Blog

This is a guest post from Helen Souness of Envato, a PressNomics Sponsor.

We’re so excited to be sponsoring PressNomics again this year. Last year’s event was absolutely fantastic according to all reports from our founders who attended. This year we are very excited to have the following team going:

• Helen Souness, GM Marketplaces
• Justin French, Product Owner
• Lance Snider, Growth Manager
• Scott Wills, Community Manager
• Japh Thomson, WordPress Evangelist

If you’re not sure who Envato is, we’re the company behind eight different Marketplaces selling digital products, including ThemeForest which sells templates such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and E-Commerce themes, CodeCanyon which sells plugins and scripts and VideoHive which sells video footage and AfterEffects files. We also run the Tuts+ Network of nine tutorial sites teaching people how to code, design and even craft.  Our recent addition to the Envato stable is MicroLancer where people can get small design and coding jobs done for a set fee and turn around time, super easily.  We now have over 3 million members in our community worldwide, and we welcome thousands more every month.

On ThemeForest we currently have over 3,400 WordPress themes for sale, and over 1,800 WordPress plugins for sale on CodeCanyon, with new items being added to both every month.

At PressNomics we will bring you some insights that we’ve collected recently from our ThemeForest and CodeCanyon customers, identifying CMS and WordPress usage and trends as well as sharing some stories from our conversations with a few of our successful theme and plugin creators.

We’re looking forward to chatting and hanging out with all of you at PressNomics this year. Bring on Rawhide, I’m dusting off my cowboy boots!

Thanks so much to Sally, Josh and the Pagely team for what sounds like being a fantastic event.  We’ll see you there

Helen Souness
GM Marketplaces
@Envato

Part of the PressNomics experience is the honest to goodness real life socializing. This is where the real work gets done. Full Social Schedule.

Evening Social Hour

Our wonderful sponsors Envato and MOJO are each hosting an event at this years PressNomics for your enjoyment.

Thursday Night

The folks at MOJO Marketplace would like to invite you to the Big Bang Piano Bar for fun, cocktails, and dessert from 8-11pm. (I got $20 for the best Billy Joel sing-a-long). Bring your badge and drink tickets.

Friday Night

Envato will be hosting us all for appetizers, cocktails, and live music on the Rula Bula Irish Pub Patio from 8-11pm.  Bring your badge and drink tickets.

Social Saturday Activities

The organizers are happy to announce that this year’s excursions include green fields for golf and an adventure in a wild west town called RawHide.

Golfers – Fore! You will be golfing at Rolling Hills Golf Course on Saturday Oct 19th.

• You will play 9 holes stacked for a total of 18 (they are overseeding the back nine).
• The bus arrives at the Mission Palms at 10am and will leave at 10:15am sharp.
• Golf starts at 11am but you can practice your swing on the driving range before.
• The bus will be back at 3pm and leave at 3:15 sharp.
• Food and drinks will be served.
• Greens Fee’s and cart rental are covered. Please call 480-350-5052 if you need to rent clubs, They are $25.
• Don’t miss the return bus.

Rawhide – Yee Haw! A trip to the old west awaits!

• Your excursion includes a BBQ lunch, and  a TownPass wristband. The wristband covers most of the Rawhide shows and attractions like Gold panning and shootouts. There are a couple you’ll have to pony up for yourself if you like.
• The bus will arrive at the Mission Palms at 11:15am and leaves at 11:30 sharp.
• There will be 2 return buses at 2:30pm and 4:00pm.
• Don’t miss the last return bus.

We look forward to seeing you all soon.

The full schedule is now live. As a preview I wanted to share with all of you 2 special sessions we will be featuring this year at PressNomics. There are two business topics that are of particular interest to me which I know are of interest to many others in our ecosystem: Commercialization and Distributed teams.

On top of the amazing and talented speakers that will be doing solo talks at PressNomics, we will be featuring two ‘Conversations’ around the above topics. We have hand selected 6 folks to partake in these conversations, that will each be facilitated by 2 additional individuals. The aim here is to have a real and engaging dialog take place among the speakers (and the audience), driven by the facilitators. No holds barred.

Commercialization in the WordPress Ecosystem

Facilitator: Tony Perez
Participants: Carl Hancock, Cory Miller, Pippin Williamson

If you were at the first PressNomics you may remember Tony asking some pointed questions to Matt around commercializing plugins. I for one was left a bit unsatisfied by the answers and would have loved to hear more discussion on this topic. So here it is, a full hour with Tony, Carl, Cory, and Pippin to go into depth on the many facets of monetizing WordPress.

Leading Without Seeing: Managing Distributed Teams

Facilitator: Shane Pearlman
Participants: Jake Goldman,Tom Willmot, Stuart West

The traditional workplace is changing. Distributed teams are more commonplace than ever before. In many tech startups remote workers have become the defacto norm. It is all smiles and roses right? Well.. Yahoo! found it was not working and called all their employees back to the office and caught all sorts of blowback from it, but also recently reported huge gains in employee productivity after the change. So we are going to explore the how and why, the wins and pitfalls of managing a remote workforce.

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These two discussions should be very interesting as we explore these topics in depth that most if not all of us are affected by.

See you all soon, we’re about 2 weeks away.

We are happy to introduce the following speakers to complete the lineup for PressNomics. Meet all the speakers.

The Tempe Mission Palms is sold out of rooms for our dates. Since no one procrastinated and everyone got their room early that should not be a problem for anyone. ;/

What’s that you say? You did not reserve your room and are in a scramble to find something?

Try these establishments close by.

• Marriott Courtyard – 480-966-2800, is on Ash and 5^{th ,}  800-321-2211
• Otherwise Residence Inn is due to open Sept. 26^th, 510 S Forest Ave, Tempe · (480) 967-2300 and 800- 331-3131, Downtown at Forest (there is another Tempe Residence a little further away as well)

PressNomics is a mere 7 weeks away! Please help us welcome these fine folks to the speaking lineup.