Category: Sponsors

WordCamp Pune Impact: Two organisations fully embrace GPL, one trademark violation averted

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Themechilly is now 100% GPL!

When ZNetLive, one of the leading hosting providers in India approached to sponsor us, we were more than happy to have them on board. However, we later realised that ThemeChilly, a sister concern of ZNetLive, used a restrictive license incompatible with GPL.

Instead of recanting their sponsorship, the great folks at ZNetLive engaged in a fruitful discussion with Aditya Kane  (WordCamp Deputy and mentor to WordCamp Pune) and myself and switched to 100% GPL Licensing!

This is what Dakshesh Verma, Marketing head –ZNetTechnologies (the parent company of ZNetLive and ThemeChilly has to say about it:

Initially at ThemeChilly, we had a relatively restrictive usage license for our themes and plugins, as we were slightly apprehensive about the possible ‘piracy’ GPL might’ve entailed on our WordPress products; a misconception we had, due to, frankly, our misunderstanding, or rather limited understanding, of GPL and its implications.

Having come to fully grasp how perfectly GPL captures, and passes on the essence and liberty of WordPress to everyone – the developers and users alike, it made good sense for us to have all our products GPL’d.

Being a part of WordPress community, we want our end users to have and benefit from the same level of freedom that WordPress as a platform has provided to us. 🙂

Slidervilla updates its licensing to become 100% GPL!

SliderVilla, another sponsor of ours was GPL in principle since the licensing said that their code was 100% GPL. However, their terms of purchase conflicted with the license and had very restrictive terms. Alexander Gounder (a WordCamp Deputee) pointed this out to us, since we just happened to see the license and not the other terms.

When contacted, SliderVilla agreed and updated their terms within 10 minutes! Sanjeev Mishra the CEO of SliderVilla says

GPL helps in building a strong community around a product or software, and WordPress itself is one of the best examples. It compels us to work together and build upon the original work and put best foot forward.

SliderVilla started because its founders got so much help from the WordPress community in their early days. And releasing our products under GPL license is one way to say thanks and giving it back to the same community.

WordPress in the TLD

One of our sponsors who wouldn’t like to be named (and we respect that!) had purchased a TLD with the word WordPress in it. Unaware that it violated the WordPress trademark, they immediately took it down when informed about the copyright and trademark infringement. Another day and another disaster averted.

High five, community! Make sure you are there at WordCamp Pune to meet them and other champions of open source! Get your ticket now!

We have more friends!

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ThemeIsle

logo.png 200×37We’re ThemeIsle . But hey, don’t take my word for it. Here’s something that never lies – raw numbers:
We have one of the top 10 most popular themes released last year in the theme directory.
Our plugins have been downloaded more than 500,000 times and we blog about this awesome CMS on http://www.codeinwp.com/blog/.
Oh, and we’re not hiding behind a business curtain of any kind. We’re real guys (and gals), so don’t hesitate to say hi!

IMHosts

logo (1)We are a new startup based in Mumbai & Delhi with the aim to provide web services at utmost affordable rates & with best tech support to our clients . We are very happy to Support the Word camp & wish the organisers good luck.

White Shadows Analytical Intelligence

WS-whiteshadows_ai-01A full service digital marketing company, our team develop effective content strategies for forward thinking companies. We have a proven track record in increasing search engine rankings. We pursue relationships based on transparency, persistence, mutual trust, and integrity with our employees, customers and other business partners. Our team of specialists consistently deliver outstanding results for our clients. We combine creative ideas with vast experience in search technologies to deliver measurable results for our clients. We will help them to build a sustainable, meaningful relationship with their clients by engaging them with their brand using social media promotion. Our winning solutions and experience helps to deliver great results across several key areas; search engine optimisation, social media marketing, email marketing and digital marketing. This combination has helped many of our clients to interact and engage with their customers the new better way.

Atlas SoftWeb is our final hero

AtlasSoftWebAtlas SoftWeb is located in Ahmedabad, India. We are an Open Source based web development company undertaking projects based on WordPress. We build websites and themes to help our customers solve their business problems using cutting edge web systems that are built upon WordPress. Our projects help our customers promote and brand their business and help them get higher ROI.

At Atlas SoftWeb, we are a team of web professionals including developers, front-end designers and website testers with extensive WordPress experience. We specialize in building responsive WordPress themes and have been the choicest offshore dedicated developers for clients in US, Canada and UK.

For more details visit us on www.atlassoftweb.com

 

BuddyBoss becomes an Angel like a boss!

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BuddyBoss helps entrepreneurs to create successful BuddyPress communities. They build and sell a suite of products for building social networks including themes, plugins and packaged solutions. They have a team of specialised designers and developers who understand BuddyPress inside out. Oh, and they’re hiring.

Their goal is to spread the word about BuddyPress, to contribute to the BuddyPress community, and to help organizations build fantastic, lively communities for their fans and followers.

All of us love BuddyPress, don’t we? We’re going to have a fun time discussing BuddyPress with the guys from BuddyBoss.

weDevs have developed into Angels

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weDevs is a WordPress based product company located in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Their very first product was WP User Frontend, released on the WordPress plugin repository in early 2011, which officially started business with the Pro version in early 2013. Since then, they are mostly known for front-end plugins.

WP User Frontend is their most popular plugin with more than 151,280 downloads and 10,000 active installs till now. It is used to create front-end interfaces for custom post type and page.

WP Project Manager is their signature product and the only complete project & task management system for WordPress. It was first released in late 2012 and more features requested by more than 3500 customers are being added.

Dokan is their flagship product and the only complete front-end based multi-vendor plugin for WordPress, first released on February 2014. It has all the features that you might need to run a marketplace and can be used with any WooCommerce compatible theme and plugin.

We are proud to have a neighbour as a sponsor for the first time! We hope this helps better co-operation and collaboration between the South Asian WordPress communities across political boundaries!

ZNetLive is now Live as a WordCamp Pune Angel

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Founded in 2001, ZNetLive is an ICANN accredited domain registrar and is a provider of whole range of hosting services starting from Shared hosting, Reseller hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS, Dedicated server, Cloud solutions, & other related online business applications. One of the early-adopters of the new gTLD wave, ZNetLive provides more than 250 Generic Top Level Domains to its end customers.

They provide economical domain names and hosting services as they believe that being the pre-requisites for the presence on web, they should be available at a minimal price. They strive to deliver ingenious services and products with consistently higher standards. Their WordPress hosting is especially optimised exclusively for WordPress websites and blogs.

The nice people from ZNet approached us to sponsor WordCamp Pune and were very friendly and co-operative. They even went ahead and converted one of their sister brands from a partially restrictive license to GPL. Needless to say, we’re really glad to see them aboard!

Thank you for covering us – Call for Sponsors closes on 6th August

We’re covered!

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Thanks to the overwhelming response from all you awesome sponsors, WordCamp Pune 2015 has almost covered it’s budget!

While we’ve already announced most of our sponsors, a couple will be announced as soon as we complete the formalities.

Call for Sponsors closes on 6th August

Now, that we have awesome photographers, volunteers, sponsors and speakers on board, we want to divert all our attention to preparing the actual event down to the last detail.

This means that we don’t want to spend a lot of time in all the formalities and documentation. Also, there’s only so much space on banners, slides and for setting up stalls. We don’t want it to be a crowd!

If you wish to join the bandwagon, hop in fast because the sponsorship train leaves the station on Thursday, 6th August, 2015.

What happens to the surplus?

If we collect surplus amounts, it is sent to WordCamp Central and used to fund a WordCamp that maybe has difficulties attracting sponsors. It is also used to fund other community initiatives like meetups.

We still want to help sponsor WordCamps

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You sure can! There are many things you can do:

  • Sponsor in kind. How about picking up a couple of bills directly? Or maybe just give 500 useful gifts to participants of WordCamp Pune!
  • Sponsor the long haul. You could sponsor the local meetup group that organises this WordCamp so that they can help strengthen and evolve the community and do a better job next time!
  • Sponsor another WordCamp. Check the international WordCamp schedule and look for any upcoming WordCamps in India. Sponsor them! There’s one already there, 😉 😉

Now that we’re free from worrying about funds, we can completely focus on giving you the most awesome WordCamp experience ever! Make sure you don’t miss out.

See you at WordCamp Pune 2015!

 

We get by with a little help from our friends

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Oh, we know this is not what John Lennon meant exactly but the feeling of gratitude is the same! Here are our friends at WordCamp Pune 2015:

Dr. Tarique Sani

tariqueA Pediatrician and a Forensic Expert by education. A passionate PHP geek. Currently CTO, SANIsoft. Also a photographer, bird watcher, nature lover and a FOSS enthusiast, in no particular order.

InkMyWeb

inkmywebInk my web is a Digital Agency based out of Mumbai. We build websites and themes using WordPress. We believe sponsoring a WordCamp is not a marketing opportunity but opportunity to contribute to a local WordPress Community.

13 Llama Studio

13llamaThe nice people at 13 Llama Studio,

  • Develop awesome websites & apps using WordPress
  • Use cutting-edge web technology to solve your business problems,
  • Help you with strategy for promotion & customer acquisition through the web,
  • Help you monetize your web properties, and
  • Turn your world-conquering ideas into working products.

MilesWeb

mwMilesWeb is a web hosting service provider that runs on the belief that web hosting should be fast, reliable, simple and affordable. They started off with the aim to support the ever growing online business and meet the expectations of business users at an affordable price.

Web hosting services offered by MilesWeb comprises of technology, uptime and 24x7x365 exclusive customer support. They offer hosting services to all sectors and businesses of all sizes and have product and service offerings from basic hosting account to complex dedicated server clusters on multiple platforms.

BlogBrandz

new logoBlog Brandz’s deepest desire is to help their clients create more visibility and branding online, as well as generate more leads and sales, using blogs and social media marketing. Their clients include entrepreneurs and corporate organisations who want to boost their visibility and become the leading authority in the eyes of their customers using blogs and content marketing.

Blog Brandz sets up and maintains your blog for you, and creates the kind of content that attracts customers looking for your products and services online. They also manage your social media presence and build active, engaged communities interested in what you have to offer. If you want to boost the reputation and credibility of your business, Blog Brandz can help you achieve your goals.

rtCamp is one Angelic Happy Camper at WordCamp Pune

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rtCamp is a leading WordPress based consulting and products based company in India, started in 2009.

rtCampers love open-source culture and are often seen contributing to WordPress core and community work.

Although that’s how little rtCamp wishes to say for themselves, we’d like to go a little out of the way to bring their contributions to light.

For instance, three of the organisers are current employees and four used to be employees. Their employees have the distinction of having the largest number of core contributions from India!

In fact, initially when we had reservations about letting rtCamp sponsor this event (because the CEO is an organiser as well), they offered to sponsor anonymously! Kudos to the team and we look forward to having this camp over at ours!

SliderVilla is now a Hero at WordCamp Pune

SliderVilla has a large collection of over nineteen feature rich WordPress Sliders with unique designs and multiple skins. With more than 600K downloads of their free and premium sliders, they reach a large number of WordPress users. They offer features like WooCommerce and Events compatibility, RSS Feed Slider, Recent Posts/Category Slider, Video Slider, Social Media Integrations like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram using their API, WPML compatibility, Easy Builder, Drag and Drop Reorder and Smart QuickTag in all slider plugins.

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Customer service and support get the highest priority at SliderVilla and they offer premium looking carousels with best possible after-sales support and that’s what makes them a proud memeber of the WordPress community.

SliderVilla wamts to welcome the WordPress community members to its motherland, Pune. Pune is the birthplace of SliderVilla but now it operates from Nashik, India under its parent company, WebFanzine Media Pvt. Ltd.

WordCamp Pune 2015 is over. Check out the next edition!