For those developing any type of technology, you need to know when it’s worth filing a patent and when it’s not. Startups must use their resources carefully but need to recognize when their IP is at risk. Our panel of experts includes Dana Zottola, Patent Expert, Braxton Woodham, Founder & Patent Holder, and Lowell Ness, Attorney at Orrick.
SPEAKERS
Dana Zottola, a Scientific Advisor and Patent Agent in Orrick’s Silicon Valley office, is a member of the Intellectual Property Group. She has extensive educational and employment experience in electrical and computer engineering. Dana is experienced with a broad spectrum of patent prosecution processes including preparing and filing patent applications, responses to office actions, inventor and Examiner interviews, appeals before the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, appeal and reply briefs, and reexaminations. Dana is very experienced in due diligence in merger and acquisition matters, prior art and invalidity research, licensing negotiations, IP counseling, and IP management. Dana also has extensive international patent prosecution experience. Dana’s patent prosecution practice covers a wide variety of technologies, including software, processor architecture, semiconductor memories, semiconductor processing and manufacturing, mobile platforms, compiler design, enterprise software integration, digital rights management, virtualization and security processes, mobile devices and communication, consumer products, clean tech, reactor design, refinery design, green energy, networking and more. Prior to Orrick, Dana worked at Intel as a Quality & Reliability Engineer where she designed and supported system level microprocessor aging labs and analyzed performance degradation. She published company-wide documentation for accelerated aging of CPUs as well as newly defined usage models. Dana received “Best in Session Recognition” at Intel’s 2006 “Quality & Reliability Technical Symposium” and two Intel Corporate Quality Network “Divisional Recognition Awards” for microprocessor aging analysis and efficient definition of use conditions for new markets. Dana is registered as a patent agent to practice before the United States Patent and Trade Office (USPTO). She received her M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and B.S. in Computer Engineering from Oregon State University.
Braxton Woodham is Chief Techology Officer and Co-Founder of Ospoto. Prior to Ospoto, Braxton was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Tap11, which was acquired by AVOS. He was formerly the CTO of InfoSpace’s mobile division where he was responsible for the infrastructure that served for approximately 70% of all mobile page views in North America. Prior to Infospace, Braxton served as VP, Technology at Moviso, leading the development of the V4 Platform, which scaled by more than 100 time to support more than 16 million transactions per month across US, European and Australian carriers. Prior to joining Moviso / InfoSpace, Braxton served as Executive Director of Technology at Sony Music Digital Media Ventures, where he focused on new Internet initiatives including Keyhole, which later became Google Earth. Prior to his career in software development Braxton served as Lead Propulsion Engineer for two Atlas missions and a Captain in the United States Air Force.
Lowell Ness is a partner and a founding member of the Orrick’s Emerging Companies Group in the Silicon Valley Office. He has considerable experience in securities law and corporate governance matters. His practice focuses on high growth emerging companies and involves venture capital financings, mergers and acquisitions, public offerings and private placements. His clients include startup companies from the earliest stage and well established public companies. Mr. Ness also represents both private equity and venture capital funds.
