PHPCon East Opens Wednesday in NYC

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 21, 2003

For more information contact:
Monica Ortiz, 415-990-5513, monica@mktgevents.com

NEW YORK GETS A DOSE OF PHP: PHPCon East Opens Wednesday in NYC 

San Francisco, CA - Last year's successful addition to the PHP
conference circuit heads to New York City this week with an expanded
program that includes a third day of tutorials and several new and
returning PHP gurus. PHPCon East 2003, the first of two regional,
PHP-centric shows scheduled in 2003, runs April 23 to 25, 2003 at the
Park Central Hotel in New York City, NY.

"PHPCon's aim is deceptively simple," said Bryan Richard, PHPCon
Conference Director, "bring people together and discuss PHP.  We have a
very PHP-savvy audience who lets us know immediately if something isn't
up to spec. There's a lot of energy and excitement in this community and
we work very hard to make sure PHPCon's program hosts outstanding
sessions and encourages active participation from attendees."

Now in its sophomore year, PHPCon continues to be a tightly-focused,
community driven event that attracts PHP professionals from all over the
world as well as the top companies in PHP development including Zend
Technologies, Sams Publishing, ActiveState, Macromedia, and MySQL.com.
PHPCon's increasing popularity as a community event makes it a natural
partner with several of the top online discussion and networking sites
such as PHP.net, O'Reilly & Associates, and web-zine php|architect.

PHPCon has also become the stage for community changing announcements.
Yahoo's Michael Radwin announced at last year's PHPCon 2002 that Yahoo
was switching to PHP as the scripting language of choice for its
back-end programming. Yahoo's announcement, a huge boost for open source
programming, is yet another indication of the language's flexibility and
strength in producing interactive web pages. PHP, an open source
scripting language for the web, has been steadily gaining a foothold in
commercial usage. According to PHP.net, PHP scripts can be found in over
one million IP addresses and over 9 million domain names.

After sponsoring PHPCon 2002 last year, Sams Publishing chose this
year's PHPCon East 2003 to launch its new Developer's Library series of
books. 

"When we were looking for a high-profile event where we could announce
and publicize Developer's Library," said Mark Taber, associate publisher
with Sams Publishing, "PHPCon was an obvious choice. All the key PHP
players are there as presenters, and the attendees are the key
opinion-leaders for our target market of open-source programmers."

PHPCon East's program boasts an impressive array of experts including
PHP Inventor Rasmus Lerdorf, Zend Technologies Co-Founder Zeev Suraski,
OmniTi's George Schlossnagle, MySQL.com's Zak Greant, and popular PHP
authors Sterling Hughes, Christian Wenz, Luke Welling and Laura Thomson.

"The speakers and sessions precisely targeted my interests in making my
own PHP projects work better and more efficiently, potentially for a
much larger scale of users. The heavy-hitting personalities in the
program such as (Dirk) Elmendorf, (Rasmus) Lerdorf, and (Shane) Caraveo
were attractions in their own rights," said PHPCon 2002 attendee George
Web, Web Programmer for The Vermont Teddy Bear Company in New England.
"I am the only person in my company who has any experience with Open
Source and non-commercial software such as PHP, so it is a job in and of
itself for me to introduce the concept of PHP to my associates."

The decision to offer two regional shows and take the first PHPCon of
2003 to the East Coast also reflects the PHP community's wishes.  Nearly
half the event's registrants hail from local counties while other
registrants commute from other US States, Europe, and Latin America.
With both 2003 shows offering strong technical programs and notable
speakers, aficionados with budget and travel restrictions have more
opportunities to attend PHPCon.  PHPCon West 2003 is scheduled for late
October in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"Seeing as many people, as we have, turn out for a US conference in this
down economy says that the PHP community has the drive and desire to
support both PHPCon and PHP's growth. Having an event like PHPCon, which
helps focus the PHP community, will only serve to strengthen PHP," said
Richard. "We are able to create an event that's comfortable and fosters
learning. We're going to be around for a while."

More information about PHPCon East 2003 can be found on the conference
web site: http://www.php-con.com. Session abstracts and speaker
biographies are also available on the web site.

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Members of the press are eligible for complementary passes to PHPCon
East 2003. Please see our web site for registration details:
http://www.php-con.com/2003/east/press.php