Full Name
Andreas Pongratz
Job Title
CEO
Company
x.news information technology gmbh
Speaker Bio
Andy is and always was a passionate, creative & curious human being.
„What is next and what could be the new one?“
Born 1961, grown up in a beautiful countryside of Austria.
Passionate about classical.
He is living with his partner Michaela in Salzburg and has 4 children!
Work:
Andy after his English, Music and Italian studies in Vienna has worked as a teacher for 4 years . He held various seminars for teachers in Vienna for the Computer assisted language learning project and served as a member of the approval committee for schoolbooks in English and Italian for secondary grade.

He then moved on and worked as a VP of sales for Apple @ Hard and Soft to build up their media center in Vienna and strengthen the cooperations with Avid, Digidesign where he did coaching and trainings of various of media companies teams in digital technologies.
At Ars Electronica Festival in Linz he worked as PM and built Europe’s first „Video on demand“ system as well as the „adventure elevator“ in the museum of the future.
Since 1993 he is the CEO of X-Art Pro Division Ges.m.b.H. todays biggest SME in Austria for audiovisual solutions and workflow integrations where he is responsible for marketing and international cooperations.
He led a joint venture of X-Art and Telekom Austria called IVS to develop the TA broadband video online service www.aon.tv where he acted as VP of Business development.
Andy was a member of the juries of the Ars Electronica festival U-19 as well as the „National price for Multimedia and e-business“. He also acted as chairman of the jury for innovation at Austrian Wirtschaft Service (national agency for economic development) and deputy chair member of the ethics board of the EU funded security project “INDECT”
He also worked on special projects both in coordination and management for the CEO of RedBull Media House and the ORF as well as Telekom Austria and gave national and international keynotes on 3 continents.
Since 2015 he is co-founder and CEO of x.news the leading realtime monitoring and research tool for global media, corporates and governmental organizations.
Andreas Pongratz