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About Me

Burnes started in the entertainment industry as a child actor in the epic Peter Brook film “Lord of the Flies” in the role of ‘Douglas.’  He worked on a number of major feature films, documentaries, television shows, commercials and animation productions and has developed major interactive and entertainment experiences worldwide. Burnes was a pioneer in the ‘guerilla television’ movement and a founding member of the Alternate Media Center at NYU with George Stoney and Red Burns.  After he did his MA and PhD work at the University of Texas, Austin in the Department of Radio, Television,  Film in  innovation theory and new media, he entered the corporate world where he had a number of jobs managing high tech and software companies worldwide.

Burnes started his corporate business career as the Assistant to the Chairman of I.T.T.  and ran some of their line unit operations, ran a public software company division of Tymshare/Tymnet in Silicon Valley, was Vice President and CTO at Mcgraw-Hill, and was  Vice president of Worldwide Services, which he started and built  at Documentum, (now an EMC company). He ran the worldwide new media practice at the now-legendary Renaissance Strategy and was a founder, partner and Managing Director of the Alliance for Converging Technologies, a think-tank on convergence from which the content was developed for his business partner Don Tapscott’s best selling books, Paradigm Shift , The Digital Economy and Digital Capital.

Over the years, Burnes has guided many Fortune 500 companies and startups to find new opportunities, build new products and services, align with new partners as well as deliver new offerings to the marketplace. He has lectured and taught at the University of Texas, Austin, Yale University, Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley, Temple University, University of Buenos Aires, Canberra University, University of Toronto, New York University, and lectured in government, defense and intelligence agencies on his field. He has been a regular contributor to Business Week and a columnist in "teledot.com" magazine and published widely in the academic and popular journals worldwide. He also writes contributing pieces for gamasutra.

Today, Burnes runs the digital entertainment alliance, (http://www.dealliance.com) a new media think-tank and consultancy. He is an acknowledged world-wide “go-to” guy for companies in the interactive new media and digital entertainment space for strategic and tactical advice to Fortune 500 companies and companies interested in the trans-media digital entertainment space.  He is known for being highly creative and innovative but able to practically distill the big picture down to key issues, achievable initiatives and practical execution plans for businesses. Having run operations, he thinks like a biz guy and is routinely asked to speak on topics related to the new media, digital entertainment industry and trans-media, including gaming, gamification & immersive worlds, digital advertising, mobility & communications, animation & cgi, digital film, digital music, net tv, content, social media, applications, services & infrastructure. He also runs dea game studios, a trans-media company which creates social mobile and platform games, immersive worlds, serious games, animation & interactive media in austin, texas, santa monica, and san francisco california.

My Links

the digital entertainment alliance
The digital entertainment alliance

Education and Qualifications

BA - New York Univeristy - Political Science & Economics

MA - University of Texas, Austin, Innovation Theory, College of Communications

PhD (ABD) - University of Texas, Austin, Trans-media, College of Communications