The big daddy of WordCamps is open about another week for speaker submissions, if you have something interesting you’d like to say to the WordPress world send in your application to speak at WordCamp SF here.

Extended Interview with Forbes

June 12, 2014AsidespressMatt Mullenweg

J. J. Colao, who covered Automattic for Forbes Magazine in 2012 and has a long history and experience with WordPress and Automattic, sat down with me for close to three hours in March and somehow managed to distill it down to just a few thousand words of interview. (“13,500 words down to 2,800.”) I’m sheepish to link it because there are a lot of “I” statements and some nuance lost in the distillation, but JJ asks great questions and we cover a lot of ground that anyone who follows Automattic or the WordPress ecosystem I think will find interesting. You can check it out here.

iOS 8 WebKit changes finally allow all apps to have the same performance as Safari. I was just asked about the future of the mobile web at last night’s WP talk in Singapore. (Which had about 300 people there, great turnout!) There are still a lot of issues for the open web in a closed mobile world, but things like this are a great step in the right direction. Another reason I can’t wait for iOS 8. Hat tip: Matt Bumgardner.

“These big collections of personal data are like radioactive waste. [...] Surveillance limits our ability to be creative with technology. It’s like a tax we all have to pay on innovation.”

Maciej Cegłowski gave a great talk he later wrote out in The Internet With A Human Face.

Jessica Pressler in New York Magazine has an unintentionally funny look at Silicon Valley’s Laundry-App Race.

Socket.IO 1.0 is available with a number of new features, including binary support. Socket.IO is one of the most useful tools in the Node.js world.

Seoul, Jakarta, Singapore, Tokyo, Osaka, Manila, Melbourne, Sydney, Wellington, and Auckland

May 26, 2014AsidesMatt Mullenweg

Later this week I’m heading on a speaking tour of a number of cities in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand talking about the past and future of WordPress and some of the things I’ve learned in the past few years of building WordPress and Automattic. It’s been a number of years since I’ve visited these countries, and I’ve never been to Korea, Singapore, Melbourne, or Auckland before, so really looking forward to meeting the local communities in each of these cities and learning about how we can best set up WordPress for the coming decade of growth, especially in languages other than English.

If you’re near any of these cities and want to come by check out the following links for more information. Even if it says “sold out” already, as many are, put your name on the waitlist anyway because I know some places are already searching for larger venues, and there could always be cancellations or spaces open up at the last minute.

Asia

Australia & New Zealand

The schedule might be a little exhausting, but I wanted to make it as many communities as possible in the short window of time I have before I need to be stateside again.