summit

Toni Schneider To Speak At Freemium Summit

By Jeffro on March 11, 2010

Automattic CEO Toni Schneider will be presenting at the Freemium Summit taking place in San Francisco at the Mission Bay Conference Center on March 26th 2010. The price for admission is $449.00 which is a reality check to anyone who is used to attending a WordCamp. However, there will be a number of speakers from companies that are in the middle of capitalizing on the hybrid business model of free mixed with premium. Speakers such as Tom Conrad of Pandora, Phil Libin of Evernote, Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures, and Ben Chestnut of Mailchimp will be on hand.

Although I won’t be in attendance for this summit, I plan on doing something similar on my own through WordPress Weekly for the month of April. Each week will be dedicated to a specific commercialization aspect of WordPress. We’ll cover themes, plugins, services, and at the end of the month, have a wrap-up show. Jake Goldman, one of the organizers for WordCamp Boston will be joining me on these shows as a co-host. I’m currently in the middle of getting the round table of speakers set for each week. Keep an eye out on the WordPress Weekly category as when I have things set in stone, I’ll announce them there.

If Matt Could Start Over

By Jeffro on February 5, 2010

Having said that, Mullenweg believes that if he had to do it all again starting in 2010 he would do it differently.

“The trajectory (of WordPress) would look very different because the software world is different now. The blog market is more saturated and social tools are a lot more important so, yeah, maybe it would look different and maybe one of the first features I’d build in would be a Facebook integration or something like that, whereas five or six years ago this wasn’t even on anybody’s mind.”

Source – SiliconRepublic There’s life in the old blog yet

Overall, a great writeup of Matts keynote presentation at the Web summit that was recently held in Dublin, Ireland. Blogging is not dead and it won’t die for a considerable amount of time, if ever. I think Matt hits the nail on the head.

“Ultimately, it is on their own domain, which is something they own and control in perpetuity no matter what Facebook, Google or Twitter does. That is always going to valuable.”

I also found this part of the article quite interesting. I’m sure some of you might disagree but I think in the bigger picture, what Matt says is true.

As an open-source platform Mullenweg says that WordPress’ innovation is driven by staying close to the community and listening to people.

“Sometimes they’ll tell us if they are really passionate about a feature or functionality and we start to think about the best way to do that. It’s something I think about a lot – we are mostly driven by the same things our users ask for.”