CommNexus San Diego

CommNexus San Diego
Board of Advisors

Jeff Belk
Board Advisor
Jeffrey Belk is a principal in ICT168 Capital, LLC, focused on developing and guiding global growth opportunities in the Information and Communication Technology space. Formerly, Belk spent almost 14 years at Qualcomm Incorporated, where prior to his departure in early 2008, he was Qualcomm’s senior vice president of strategy and market development, focused on examining changes in the wireless ecosystem and formulating approaches to help accelerate mobile broadband adoption and growth.
From 2000 until 2006, Belk was senior vice president, global marketing, leading a team responsible of all facets of the company’s corporate messaging, communications, and marketing worldwide. In 1999-2000, Belk was SVP & GM of Qualcomm Eudora Products, Qualcomm’s award winning email client. In 1997, Belk was named VP, marketing of Qualcomm Consumer Products, and initiated the company’s global branding and communications efforts.
Prior to Qualcomm, Belk spent ten years in the early growth years of the PC industry, primarily with Proxima Corporation. Belk joined the company in 1983, when the company was less than 25 employees, and was with the company through its IPO in the early 90’s in several key distribution, product management, and international roles.
Belk is known globally as a commentator and writer on wireless, mobile broadband, and technology evolution.

Lance Bridges
Board Advisor
Lance Bridges is VP of Corporate Development and General Counsel of Entropic Communications. Mr. Bridges has over 16 years of experience in general business and corporate law matters, with particular emphasis in mergers and acquisitions, financing transactions and working with technology companies. Prior to joining Entropic, he was a partner at Cooley Godward Kronish LLP, where he practiced law since 1991. Mr. Bridges received a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) and earned an M.B.A., concentrating in finance and strategic planning, from the Walter A. Haas School of Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley. Prior to attending law school, Mr. Bridges worked for a regional investment banking firm as a financial analyst specializing in business valuations and M&A advisory services.

Kevin Cahill
Board Advisor
Kevin Cahill is the Associate General Counsel at The Scripps Research Institute. Kevin Cahill practices in technology development, licensing, collaborative ventures and strategic management of worldwide intellectual property rights for the telecommunications, software, Internet, electronics and media industries. Mr. Cahill's experience includes: advising clients on how to leverage their intellectual property portfolios to achieve their business plan objectives and higher company valuations; licensing patents, copyrights, trademarks and all forms of IP for numerous applications; negotiating technology development and transfers, R&D, joint venture, manufacturing and distribution agreements; and developing practical business-oriented strategies for securing and enforcing domestic and international intellectual property protection. He also specializes in mergers and acquisitions of technology companies, technology audits, the establishment of trade secret programs, resolving infringement disputes and related intellectual property litigation.

Barry M. Clarkson
Board Advisor
Barry M. Clarkson is a partner in the Corporate Department of the firm's San Diego North County office. Mr. Clarkson is listed in the "Best Lawyers in America" in the area of corporate law. He has significant experience in transactional matters involving public and private companies, primarily in mergers and acquisitions, public and private equity and debt offerings, venture capital and general corporate matters. He serves as regular M&A and securities counsel for local public and private companies, including wireless, telecommunications and energy companies. Mr. Clarkson serves on the Board of Advisors for CommNexus (formerly the San Diego Telecom Council). Mr. Clarkson also is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Pacific South Coast Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, which serves San Diego, Orange and Imperial Counties. Mr. Clarkson is admitted to practice in California and is a member of the State of California and San Diego County Bar Associations. Prior to entering the practice of law, Mr. Clarkson was employed as a marketing representative selling voice and data networking products for a subsidiary of the IBM Corporation.

Martha Dennis
Board Advisor
Dr. Martha Dennis has been a telecommunications entrepreneur, technologist, venture capitalist, and corporate director during her 35 year career. Currently she is Principal at Gordian Knot and serves as a director on the boards of Netsapiens, Citiwink and SpaceMicro. She also serves on the advisory boards of several San Diego companies. Most recently she was a Venture Partner with Windward Ventures. She co-founded Pacific Communications Sciences, Inc. and Waveware Communications after leading software development at Linkabit Corp. She chairs the San Diego Commission on Science and Technology and she is Past Board President of CommNexus, the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center, the Bishops School, and UCSD Athena. She currently serves on the boards of Harvey Mudd College, the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, and the Triton Innovation Network as well as on the advisory boards of the UCSD Rady School of Management, the SDSU College of Engineering, and the Smith College Picker Engineering Program. She also serves as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at CONNECT’s Springboard Program and a member of the Chairmen’s Roundtable. Her doctorate is in Applied Mathematics (Computer Science) from Harvard University.

Mike Krenn
Board Advisor
Mike Krenn is the Founder of the DLA Piper's Venture Pipeline. This DLA Piper subsidiary is specifically focused on enhancing the funding prospects of early stage ventures. Led by business professionals with experience in technology, start-ups and capital markets, the Venture Pipeline actively advises on strategic business issues that are critical to funding. The group also works directly with the investment community, screening and scrubbing deal flow to match investors' specific needs with targeted companies. Krenn works directly with the Corporate Securities group to leverage the firm's experience in the emerging growth and venture capital sectors on a global level. Krenn has advised hundreds of emerging growth technology companies on various aspects of their business plans, including management and recruiting issues, market development, strategic partnerships and financing strategies. He has also helped more than 30 firms raise start-up capital. Previously, Krenn served a one-year term as Vice President of Business Development with a start-up technology company, Grip Inc., where he negotiated numerous strategic partnerships with leading industry players. Krenn was also a founding board member and executive director for the San Diego Band of Angels and currently serves on the CommNexus San Diego (formerly San Diego Telecom Council) Advisory Board.

Naser Partovi
Board Advisor
Naser Partovi is formerly President and CEO of SKY MobileMedia, a leading provider of multi-media framework and applications for cellular handsets and new generation of connected multi-media devices. Prior to joining SKY MobileMedia, Naser was a managing director at Enterprise Partners Venture Capital based in San Diego. Partovi joined Enterprise Partners Venture Capital in 2000. Naser Invested in Networking, Telecommunication, and Media communications companies. He was on the boards of: Ascendent Systems, DragonWave, NP Photonics, Quorum Systems, ReliOn, and SKY MobileMedia. Naser was also on the board of GoBeam which was acquired by Covad Communications; WIDCOMM which was recently acquired by Broadcom, and Gigabit Optics which was acquired by Oplink.

Larry Smarr
Board Advisor
Larry Smarr is the Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and Harry E. Gruber professor in the Jacobs School's Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD. As founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (1985) and the National Computational Science Alliance (1997), Smarr has driven major contributions to the development of the national information infrastructure: the Internet, the Web, the emerging Grid, collaboratories, and scientific visualization. His views have been quoted in Science, Nature, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, and Business Week, and he gives frequent keynote addresses at professional conferences and to popular audiences. Smarr received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and conducted observational, theoretical, and computational based astrophysical sciences research for fifteen years before becoming Director of NCSA. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1990 he received the Franklin Institute's Delmer S. Fahrney Gold Medal for Leadership in Science or Technology. He was a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee and serves on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and the NASA Advisory Council. He served as chair of NASA's Earth System Science and Applications Advisory Committee and was the first chair of the newly formed NASA Science Advisory Council.

Howard "Skip" Speaks
Board Advisor
Howard "Skip" Speaks has over 20 years of telecommunications experience in the network operator and the wireless equipment manufacturing and vendor business. Speaks is currently CEO of Rosum Corporation, an indoor positioning technology company. Speaks previously served as CEO for Kyocera-Wireless Corporation, a San Diego based wireless handset manufacturer, and at Ericsson as Executive Vice President and General Manager for their Wireless Division. Speaks earned a Bachelor of Science Degree for Civil Engineering from West Virginia Institute of Technology and is a registered professional engineer. (6/07)

Mark Steele - President, SPMC Group
Board Advisor

Mark holds a B.S. in Engineering Management from Stanford University and has over 25 years of executive management experience with various wireless communications industry leaders including IBM, Qualcomm, Gateway, Symbol Technologies and Motorola. He also has start-up business experience with wireless internet pioneers such as PCSI and Airprime and has advised several early stage companies. He has extensive experience in multiple operational and functional areas, including sales, product development, product and program management, systems engineering, and quality management. He is known as a mobile internet leader with several industry ‘firsts’ to his credit: Palm OS Smartphone, internet browser on mobile phone, CDMA OEM module, rugged wireless laptop and rugged touch screen bar code scanner. Mark serves on the Advisory Board and is a past Board member and Chairman of CommNexus, a communications industry non-profit group that includes over 300 of Southern California’s leading technology companies. He also participates in the CommNexus “NextStage” program, working with senior industry leaders to provide free consultation to early stage companies. He is also on the Board of the San Diego Chapter of PDMA, the National Product Development Management Association and sits on the Advisory Board of Incendonet, a San Diego start-up providing world-class speech recognition solutions to small and medium businesses. Mark Steele is President of SPMC Group, an international strategy, product management and sales consulting practice. SPMC specializes in exploiting lower cost alternate routes to market and improving its client’s ability to meet market needs earlier in the product life cycle.

Malcolm Wood
Board Advisor
Malcolm Wood former CEO of Littlefeet, a San Diego-based communications company; and Senior VP of Wireless Facilities, Inc. (WFI), returned to his native country England after eight years in the US. Malcolm joined a UK venture firm Create Partners, and was subsequently appointed as CEO with one of their portfolio companies, Camrivox. This compliments his work on behalf of CommNexus to establish relationships with European communications companies. Malcolm is also on the board of Cambridge Wireless and has formed an alliance with CommNexus to promote international cooperation.

Julie Meier Wright
Board Advisor
Julie Wright is President and Chief Executive Officer of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation. She previously served as California's first Secretary of Trade and Commerce and was a member of Governor Wilson's cabinet. Before entering public service, she spent 25 years in executive marketing and public affairs posts in the private sector, including 14 years with TRW Inc. Ms. Wright serves on the boards of California Institute for Federal Policy Research, the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau, the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, BIOCOM, the San Diego Science & Technology Council, San Diego Workforce Partnership and the San Diego Dialogue. A former chair of the California Economics Strategy Panel and the Governor's Advisory Council on Biotechnology, she earlier served on the California World Trade Commission, the advisory committee of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and the boards of the California State University Institute, Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation and Bay Area Economic Forum.

A Network of Communications Companies

CommNexus San Diego Board of Advisors

CommNexus San Diego
Board of Advisors