October’s speaker is Kate Purmal, who founded our Thursday Morning Dialog group, and is the Chief Executive Officer of U3, a smart USB drive company.

Kate Purmal has more than 20 years of computer industry experience as an entrepreneur, corporate executive and independent consultant. Prior to U3, her successful management consulting business landed her in roles at Adobe, CBS MarketWatch, Hewlett-Packard, Intuit, Palm and Handspring, and dozens of start-ups. Kate was a founding member of palmOne (formerly Palm Computing), where she built and ran the product marketing and strategic alliance organizations. She helped palmOne launch its platform and successful developer community which now boasts hundreds of thousands of developers. In addition, Kate has held senior roles in marketing, product marketing, business development, sales, and engineering at Interleaf, Grid Systems, and Computer Associates. Kate holds a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from the University of California in San Diego.

Kate will speak on the origins of TMD, her background, role and experience at U3, and how it may become the next computing platform.