Public Relations/Marketing Bio

Amanda McPherson has effectively marketed high technology software and service companies for over thirteen years. Most recently, she was director of marketing for Covalent Technologies, the leading provider of Apache Web server software. Previously, she served at two of the industry's largest public relations agencies -- Cunningham Communication and Burson-Marsteller -- where her work was recognized by an industry award from the Public Relations Society of America. At those agencies, she managed public relations, marketing and positioning campaigns for such clients as Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Corio, Novell, AlphaBlox and others. She was a core member of the marketing team responsible for the launch of the Java programming language in 1995. A published fiction author, Amanda graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona.

Currently she is director of marketing for the Free Standards Group, the certification and standardization authority for Linux. There she built the first marketing team and strategy for the organization, increasing press coverage by 500 percent, web traffic by 400 percent and helped increase the operating budget four-fold in the past two years.