Category: Event News

Hey all attendees and those that are interested. I spent the last 2 evenings whipping up this page that will stream in live updates from the blog, twitter, foursquare and flickr.

So tweet, take some photos and add to this flickr group, checkin when you arrive, and comment on the live blog posts throughout the day and sit back and watch it all stream in.

Curious how it works? It polls the services every so often, saves the results to memcached, builds an array of all items and sorts on timestamp and renders out the page. Every few seconds it runs the process again and prepends new items to the top. The memcached TTL is different for each service and staggered so the hope is to avoid all services being polled at once and slowing down the page load. We also cache the whole page in Varnish, and purge it periodically to refresh the landing page for new visitors.  Not bad for a hack of a programmer like myself.

So, who’s this Matt guy that everybody keeps talking about? I get it… He likes BBQ and comes from Texas but my mom likes pancakes and was born in Wisconsin. What’s the BFD? All kidding aside, we are honored, humbled, and happy to announce that Matt Mullenweg has agreed to a special interview during PressNomics. I could ramble on about Matt’s accomplishments but for brevity’s sake we’ll just call him the ‘Godfather’ of WordPress. Anyone have a pimp cup goblet I could borrow?

Matt and I, Sally Strebel, will be sitting down to talk (Friday) about a range of topics around the business side of WordPress and other more personal questions such as how achieving a measure of business success at a young age has shaped his outlook on things.

– Sally

In the final stages of planning we need to get a headcount of those bowling and golfing. It is easier if we know who is NOT participating. Some of you are flying out early, some may just not be interested.

If you will NOT be participating in the Sat. social activity please let us know below.

This is it kids, the session schedule has been finalized.  A few of our initial speakers could not make it and we found some amazing replacements.

New Sessions

Pete Davies
The business of WordPress: the ecosystem behind 17% of the web.

Dave Bittner
Top Ten Financial Tips for Business Owners

Aubrey Sabala
How to Make your Communications Relevant

Gregarious Narain
The Business of Visual Media

Welcome Envato

Envato stepped up from a community level sponsor to the commerical level. Everyone please show them your appreciation.

Transportation

Finally… Does everyone love Uber as much as me? Follow @Uber_Phx and keep an eye on your inbox…

Definitely looking forward to working with @strebel and @pagely! They rock our socks right off! #Uberlove

— Uber Phoenix (@Uber_Phx) October 9, 2012

Wow, time flys huh.

Here we are about 33 days out from the first of its kind gathering of the brightest minds in the commercial WordPress ecosystem coming together for 3 days of education, collaboration and fun.

Our goal in hosting this event is to foster dialog around the commercial aspects of WordPress, get the major players in the same space, and see what happens. Programming wise we shot for a mix of “How I did it” from leaders of their respective industry and WordPress specific topics. We think we nailed it with this awesome list of speakers. We anticipate many interesting side conversations in the hallways and over drinks taking place as those in attendance take this opportunity to collaborate on new ventures or partnerships.

A couple event details to pass along:

1. We intentionally wanted to keep the attendee list small, and the atmosphere intimate. We set a goal of 125 attendees and it looks like we will end up around 145 or so.
2. There is a wait list for a the few remaining tickets if you still wanted to attend or bring a colleague.
3. If you have not booked your travel yet, hurry up.
4. 7 countries are represented in our attendee list that include US, Canada, UK, India, Australia, South Africa and Norway. Truly a global affair.
5. Room reservations at the San Marcos may still be made by calling: 1-888-233-9527 and mentioning PRESSNOMICS. Subject to room availabilty.
6. If you will still be in town Saturday afternoon and even Sunday, Please feel free to head to Gangplank or meetup in the hotel lobby to hack, talk, or chill.

A huge thanks to all our sponsors, notably our commerical sponsors whom without their help this event would not be possible: New Relic, Firehost, Windows Azure, Zendesk, and Site5.

We look forward to seeing all of you in November.

This great group of speakers are busy people. Most successful people are. We have been leaning on them to get us their topic submissions and today we are announcing 11 of the 16 sessions.

View the Sessions on the updated schedule.

We have also provide details on the after hours entertainment. We would like to thank NewRelic, Firehost, and WindowsAzure for sponsoring 3 events for your relaxing pleasure.

New Relic is the all-in-one web application performance tool that lets you see performance from the end user experience, through servers, and down to the line of application code. New Relic is the only dashboard you need to keep an eye on application health and availability.

Cloud Hosting Without Compromise. FireHost is the leader in Secure Cloud Hosting and delivers hosting solutions to eCommerce, SaaS, healthcare IT and security companies around the world.

Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage WordPress sites across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. Build your WordPress sites on Windows or Mac OS X. You can choose to deploy to our managed Windows Azure Web Sites with native MySQL using FTP or GIT or you can deploy to your choice of 3 flavors of Linux. Microsoft’s global data center presence ensures you can scale your WordPress site up or down to meet your needs. Whether creating new WordPress Sites or enhancing existing sites, Windows Azure lets you take your ideas to market faster and respond quickly to changes in business and your business needs.

We want to introduce you to our 2 additional scheduled speakers for PRESSNOMICS.

Aubrey Sabala is the Vice President of Marketing at Sailthru. Previously, she helped lead Facebook’s Consumer Marketing team and held various roles at Google, Digg, AOL and Booz Allen Hamilton. When she’s not trying to get everyone to use “Log In” correctly as a verb, you can find her at a local concert, on the ski slopes, taking (or teaching!) a Pilates class, missing her favorite restaurants in San Francisco and waking up far too early on the weekends.

Darin Swanson (@darinrs) is the director of New Relic’s A-team agent engineers who produce monitoring and diagnostic tools for production Java, Ruby, PHP, Python and .NET applications. In his free time he will be out running the roads and trails of whatever corner of the world he happens to currently be in.

PRESSNOMICS is 72 days away.

Eventbrite has this handy chart of ticket sales by Region.  Looks like we will have a truly international cast of characters in attendance.

We sent out some special invitations to some special people for special pricing on tickets to this special event. The invitation codes will expire on July 15th and those tickets will be added to the general pool. Don’t delay, redeem your invite now.