... june general meeting ...

The official summer welcome. Out with the old, in with the new. This months meeting featured speeches by the potential members of next years board, a speech on patents by Michelle Galloway – a very successful Silicon Valley IP attorney, Stanford and Santa Clara lecturer as well as wife to an engineer topped off with lunch catering courtesy of Sade of TAN, The African Network.



The icebreaker was fun – it was basically all about picking on people (That is my way of saying I forgot the name of the icebreaker we played and I cant quite describe it). It was fun though – Michelle’s son, Will, handled the camera from multiple angles and we were lucky to have him act as color commentator during his moms speech. Alas the kids of the 00’s – They can simultaneously play Nintendo, listen to music and still pay attention to their parents?



The speech on patents focused on everything you ever needed to know from types of IP, reasons to have a patent, the hierarchy tree, common misconceptions by several involved parties, the rights provided by a patent, what makes an idea patentable, how to documents inventions properly, interactions with patent attorneys and patent examiners, US and International laws covering patents, litigation, patent invalidation, case studies on several patents, etc. Michelle was very knowledgable on the material and we were very lucky to have her. She answered tons of very specific questions and I’ll probably be pumping out two or three patent applications within the next year now that I know how to go about the whole inventive process. A fun patent just in case you were wondering? Look up US patent 6,293,874.




We had a mini intermission that allowed us to feast on the lovely Caribbean style delicacies prepared by Sade, herself an engineer at Cisco, after which we got into the speeches. Yawn. Yawn. Well, not really – with comical characters such as Alex in the crowd the candidate Q&A session was as entertaining as it was informative. I wont bore you with the details of the speech but we did have a promising group get on the podium and we believe that the upcoming year will be a great year for our chapter and we try and push through what should be the last of our infancy year.



See you all at the next meeting. Remember our monthly events:
Power Lunch – Every first Friday of the month @ 11:45AM – 1PM
General Body Meeting – Every fourth Saturday of the month @10AM - Noon