Press Release
Contact: Robert Caudle |
Phone: (919) 549-7500 ext. 107 |
Microsoft V.P. Marshall Phelps to Keynote CED’s Venture 2007
Intellectual Property Expert Will Speak April 25 at 24th Annual Conference in Durham
March 6, 2007, Research Triangle Park, NC – The Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED) today announced that Marshall Phelps, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for intellectual property at Microsoft Corp., will provide keynote remarks at CED’s Venture 2007. Now in its 24th year, CED’s Venture conference will be held April 23-25 at the Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club on the campus of Duke University in Durham, N.C.
Phelps, who will speak on April 25 at Venture 2007, supervises Microsoft's intellectual property groups including those responsible for trademarks, trade secrets, patents, licensing, standards and copyrights. He oversees the company's management of its intellectual property portfolio, which comprises some 3,000 U.S.-issued patents, their foreign counterparts and more than 11,000 trademark registrations worldwide.
Phelps joined Microsoft in June 2003 after a 28-year career at IBM Corp., where he served as vice president for intellectual property and licensing. Phelps was instrumental in IBM's standards, telecommunications policy, industry relations, patent licensing program and intellectual property portfolio development. Also, Phelps helped establish IBM's Asia Pacific headquarters in Tokyo and served as the company's director of government relations in Washington, D.C.
“We are delighted to have such a seasoned executive and intellectual property expert like Marshall Phelps provide keynote remarks at Venture 2007,” said CED President Monica Doss. “Drawing from his decades of experience at IBM and now Microsoft, Phelps will offer a unique perspective on corporate partnering and intellectual property in today’s rapidly changing innovation-based economy.”
In addition to comments from Phelps, Venture 2007 will showcase over 50 company presentations from across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, from seed-stage to mezzanine. The conference will also offer extensive networking opportunities and investor-only events. For more details on Venture 2007, visit www.cednc.org/venture.
About CED: The Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED) is a private, non-profit organization formed in 1984 to identify, enable and promote high growth, high impact entrepreneurial companies and to accelerate the entrepreneurial culture of the Research Triangle and North Carolina. Headquartered in the Research Triangle with a divisional office in Wilmington, CED is the largest and oldest entrepreneurial support organization in the nation with more than 4,000 members representing over 1,100 entrepreneurial companies, financiers and professional firms. CED provides education, mentoring and capital formation resources to new and existing high-growth entrepreneurs through annual conferences, seminars, workshops and programs on entrepreneurial management and finance. www.cednc.org
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