Sponsor Spotlight: e-magination

e-magination InfoSolutions is an information systems and consulting firm specialising in Business Intelligence and Information Management. We provide customised, costeffective and relevant IT solutions that support and guide client strategy development as well as intelligent Report and Technical Data Warehouse Development.Our people, a complement of twelve continually developing professionals, are at the heart of our success. A collective fifty-four years experience, partnered with passion, creativity and an innovating spirit, ensures our capacity grows year-on-year.

We measure our success by satisfied clients, engaged employees and the 100% rate of repeat business we enjoy. We deliver innovative, customised IT solutions to Woolworths, the Clicks Group, the Oceana Group and the Western Cape Government amongst others.

e-magination is a registered close corporation and is fully BEE owned, managed and staffed. We give back to our community by supporting not-for-profits such as Cedar High Cycling Club and New Dawn through programs that encourage independence, positive change and growth. We nurture talent through our graduate training program in collaboration with regional learning institutions.

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Sponsor Spotlight: WebSEO

Web SEO Services is a Cape Town based Online Marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Company. They work with companies of all sizes and develop an online strategy that will keep them in touch with their customers. Currently they serve customers across South Africa and Africa.

We use WordPress for the development of all of our blogs as well as most websites that require a CMS due to its ease of use and how customisable it is.

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WoofCamp for DARG – a gentle reminder to do your bit!

With the event just around the corner, we are furiously working on the finishing touches so that we make sure we hold an unforgettable event.

While we’re doing everything possible to make sure you thoroughly enjoy the day with us, we also want to really try and make a difference in the lives of those creatures less fortunate than ourselves.
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Speaker Spotlight: David Mugo

WordCamp Cape Town Speaker 2012 - David MugoI am a Kenyan ICT consultant mainly focusing on digital media & technology. I am currently working as an adviser to Kenya’s vice president and also the current chairman of Wikimedia Kenya. I developed and helped implement the digital strategy for Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete’s re-election campaign in 2010.

I have studied digital marketing trends and more so in the African market. A run a digital marketing agency based in Nairobi that also runs one of the biggest online technology, entertainment and lifestyle magazine, Niaje.com.

I am also the organizer of WordCamp Kenya, this year’s being the second one in the country.

Session: Pushing Your Blog into the Social World
Time: 12:00 – 12:25

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Speaker Spotlight: Mark Slingsby

Mark-SlingsbyMark Slingsby is co-founder and Technical Director of local Internet Service Provider RSAWEB. Through his passion for entrepreneurship and technology, Mark has worked for over 11 years in a variety of technical and strategic consulting roles for various IT companies, including, RSAWEB, Even Flow Distribution and White Wall Web. RSAWEB was the first to build and release its own Cloud Computing service to the South African market in early 2010. Mark also co-founded Net Prophet, SA’s largest free to attend, Entrepreneurial Tech Start-up Conference that aims to educate people and stimulate the Tech scene in South Africa.

Session: Scaling WordPress
Time: 13:55 – 14:20

SlideShare Personal blog Tech blog

RSAWEB Ramp Group Net Prophet

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Speaker Spotlight: Fred Roed

KEYNOTE

I’m the co-founder of a digital marketing agency called World Wide Creative. Together with my business partner, Mike Perk, and the World Wide Creative team, we aim to become the best in the world at creating (what we term) ‘profitable online communities’. On a day-to-day level we strive to consistently deliver remarkable work – in other words, work that stops people and makes them remark on it to their peers.

I started out as an illustrator / designer, but I’ve always been passionate about brand-building and marketing. My fascination with the web started in 1997 when I worked a short stint in Copenhagen for one of the first web teams in Denmark. Even back then, the talk was about continual engagement, digital narratives and real consumer interaction. In the early 2000’s, Mike and I started talking about starting something multinational, that combined our skills, and that would always have a creative slant. Hence, World Wide Creative!

Session: Midgets On Unicycles, Steve Hofmeyr & Elvis In Tableview
Time: 10:50 – 11:25

fredroed.com World Wide Collective The Heavy Chef Project

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Speaker Spotlight: Neil Pursey

Neil is the owner of WebGrowth, co-partner in Foxy Tonic and co-founder in the GROW Academy. He is passionate about search and website usability. He discovered SEO by chance in a previous business of his, realising the need for SEO skills in South Africa he founded WebGrowth in 2006. He has a deep desire for helping businesses succeed through search marketing as well as education & social development. He came across WordPress in 2008 and has never personally built a website in anything else besides it since then.

Session: Are Social metrics really affecting SEO?
Time: 11:30 – 11:55

WebGrowth

Foxy Tonic GROW Academy

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WordCamp Cape Town Speaker Tips

This year we have another great lineup of Speakers and we’re looking forward to your talks. We’re here to support you, so please ask if you have any concerns or anticipated issues.

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Rafiq Phillips making it look easy at last year’s WordCamp

The Setup – Equipment

WordCamp Cape Town’s venue this year boasts a large stage that will have a big screen at the back for presentation. There will be a Mac laptop setup beforehand, pre loaded with all the Speaker’s presentations. The Mac has a remote that will allow each speaker to control their slides during their talk.

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Laptop, remote, screen, big crowd – Just bring your A-game

  • Send your presentation slides to us before the event (Deadline for slide submission is 2 October 2012).
  • Presentation will be loaded onto the WordCamp laptop, that’s hooked up to the presentation screen and slide remote
  • Bring your own laptop and your presentation on a flashdrive as a backup (Remember your power cord!)

The same rules apply for our Micro-Sponsors doing their 3 minute Elevator Pitches. We need your presentations before the event and they will also be preloaded on the WordCamp laptop. There will be a countdown clock keeping you on your toes and within the 3 minute time limit

Your Presentation

Presentation slides can be sent to us in either Powerpoint or Keynote formats. We suggest you consider creating your presentation as a Google Presentation. This format makes it available to share with us in the cloud and can be save out as any format.

On the day, remember that nervous is normal. Try to remember you’re among fellow WordPress geeks, and we all think you’re pretty cool for doing a presentation. You might talk a little faster when nervous, so make allowances for that.

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Don’t stress, just impress the crowd

Practise your presentation before the event, and time it. If you can arrange a small audience for feedback, so much the better. We’ll be sticking to a 20 minute time limit for talks and have 5 minutes for questions. All Speakers will have to stay in this time limit for things to run smoothly on the day.

There will be a volunteer in the room to signal when you have 5 minutes remaining, and again when time is up. When your time is up, don’t make us drag you away.

Your presentation will be videotaped, so try not to turn your back on the camera while speaking. If you have to point to the screen, turn your face back to the camera and/or audience to speak. Also consider making your presentation slides available online, and give people in the audience the URL so they can download it later.

If you have any questions, concerns or special requests, please contact us. We can’t wait to have you blow us away with your presentation!

 

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Speaker Spotlight: Byron Rode

Byron is the co-founder of and lead developer at Tangram, a full service creative agency with clients in South Africa, Australia and Europe. He is extremely passionate about development on both the web and iOS, has given talks and consulted on both and has been working in the industry for more than 10 years. He is a proud father and husband and is expecting his second child in the coming weeks.
 
 
 
 
Session: Optimizing WordPress on the frontend
Time: 14:25 – 14:50

Tangram Github Stack Overflow

WP stack exchange

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Speaker Spotlight: Eric Clements

Eric ClementsEric is the founder of Kazazoom a niche development company, specializing in Mxit Apps & Games. Eric supports the sharing of ideas and innovation in the South African, as well as African Mobile Industry. Eric has made open source tools available for the creation of services on Mxit, recently launching the mxPress Plugin, which instantly integrates a WordPress site with Mxit.

Kazazoom’s apps rate in the top 10 of Mxit 3rd Party Apps, with a registered user base of over 600,000 South Africans. Eric holds a honours degrees in computer science from the University of Pretoria, and has focussed on the Mobile Industry the last 10 years. For his sins, Eric spent the majority of that time at a Management Consulting firm working with Mobile Operators. Also an ultimate frisbee player, Eric is based in Joburg, working in the fun Greenside area. Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Session:WordPress to manage Mxit Apps. Really?
Time: 09:00 – 09:25

mxPress webste mxPress plugin mxPress SVNKazazoom

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Speaker Spotlight: Matt Bush

WordCamp Cape Town Speaker Matt BushI am a web developer, and I almost exclusively use WordPress for the sites I build. I also studied music and have been playing music in one form or another since I was about 8 years old.

Session: How many drummers does it take to build a website?
Time: 16:15 – 16:40

Website

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Speaker Spotlight: Bennie Stander

Bennie Stander is an internet marketing consultant that also designs websites. He has been involved in internet marketing for nearly 10 years and a hobby became a career just over 3 years ago. Bennie has worked with hundreds of website owners, communicators and online strategists in the course of his career.
 
 
 
Session: Monetizing Your WordPress Website – Treating Your Blog As A Business
Time: 10:00 – 10:25

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Speaker Spotlight: Jeffrey Pearce

WordCamp Cape Town 2012 Speaker Jeffrey Pearce Most know me as Jeffikus. I’m one of the lead developers at WooThemes.com, and I’ve been developing with WordPress for the past 6 years. Some of my others passions are software development standards, education, and the guitar. Prior to developing with WordPress I was a business analyst for a leading web application development company in Cape Town which I worked at after getting my Honors degree in Information Systems from our local University of Cape Town

Session: The Best Tools for the Job
Time: 15:15 – 15:40

Website

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Speaker Spotlight: Matt Cohen

WCCT 2012 speaker - Matt CohenBy day, I go by Matty. I’m a lead developer over at WooThemes, where I work predominantly with PHP and JavaScript. I keep a keen eye on all products released at WooThemes and have a strong focus on coding standards and best practices. While my background is in design and music, a strong love of code and web development captured my heart. I spend most of my time working on the engine that powers all themes at Woo, known as the WooFramework, as well as WooDojo and various other exciting WooProjects. Fueled by punk-rock and a love of guitars and good music… as well as coffee.

Session: Shifting the WordPress Mindset
Time: 15:45 – 16:10

Personal Website

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WordCamp and PyCon collaborate to bring you the best of open source

Technology conferences are something special. They present rare occasions where those of the geeky persuasion can come together and talk about and share ideas with their peers. Attendees are inspired and relationships are formed that could have a long lasting impact on the world around us.

Because we live in universe of constraints, events have conspired to have two tech conferences aimed at open source technology being held in Cape Town on the same weekend.

WCCT 2012

WordCamp Cape Town 2012 (WordPress) will be held on the 4th of October and PyConZA (Python) will run from 4 – 5 October.
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WoofCamp for DARG – Episode 2…

Following on from Iggi’s blog post on 5th August, I organised to visit DARG and meet with Edna, one of the amazing fundraisers who, along with all the volunteers, donate a substantial amount of their time to the rehabilitation of a significant number of cats and dogs in need. The most important aspect of their organisation is that they follow a “no-kill” policy, so any animals that come in to their care are assured of as long and as good a life as they could hope for.
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Banner Ads for Memeburn and You

We have new Ads that will be used to promote WordCamp on Memeburn. These will also be available to everyone on the supporter badges page.

WCCT banner ads

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Speaker Spotlight: Riaan Knoetze

Riaan KnoetzeRiaan is the founder and owner of Tiny Giant Studios– a SA/UK based web design and development company specializing in WP themes, plugins and products. With degrees in a few unrelated fields, Riaan is a self-taught front end developer that has the privilege of working with Appthemes. As a keen entrepreneur, he is an early adopter of anything that improves efficiency, innovation and creativity while keeping costs to a minimum.

Session: How to Highjack a Themeshop
Time: 09:30 – 09:55

GitHub Stack Overflow Website

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Favourite tweets from #WCCT 2011

WordCamp Cape Town was buzzing with Twitter activity last year. We had volunteers live tweeting the event so that those unfortunate WordPress fans who could not attend could still follow the action from the comfort of their desks or mobile phones (Remember our hashtag: #WCCT).  Prizes were awarded in our “Why I love WordPress” competition for the most popular Facebook, Twitter and blog posts.

The “Why I love WordPress” competition’s rules were simple: ‘We often hear people professing their love for WordPress. Talking about passion and love is easy, but at WordCamp Cape Town we encourage you to “publicly proclaim your love for WordPress” and tell the world how you feel and why you feel that way.’

Here we have compiled a selection of our favourite tweets from WordCamp Cape Town 2011. Why not let us know today why you still love WordPress and what you are most looking forward to at WordCamp Cape Town 2012? Just tweet #WCCT and shout out your love from the digital heavens!

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Speaker Spotlight: Anthony Somerset

Anthony Somerset GravitarAnthony works as an Infrastruture Engineer at W3 EDGE. Day-to-day that could involve absolutely anything from fighting fires with servers, building/provisioning new infrastructure/servers for clients, all the way to general consulting on performance best practices for WP with a focus on the hardware side or even some direct work on the W3 Total Cache plugin itself. Anthony is married. He and his wife Marie are expecting their first child in February, so the feeling of late night rushes to deadlines will be constantly upon him soon 24/7!

Session: Site Speed = Success! – Optimising WordPress from the Server up
Time: 13:35 – 13:50

Personal Website Work Website

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