Zend/PHP Conference Speaker Compensation

We've heard that there have been some questions and confusion surrounding the compensation that will be provided to speakers at the Zend/PHP Conference in October. Let me try to set the record straight.

It is our intention to cover the majority of expenses for all session speakers. The compensation will include a full conference pass, one night paid hotel accomodation per session delivered, and a reasonable reimbursement for travel. That reimbursement will clearly be higher for speakers coming from a farther distance (e.g. Europe). We will work out the details for each speaker as their talks are accepted.

The goal here is to enable speakers from all over the world to present at our conference without incurring a large personal financial burden.

I'd like to personally encourage anyone interested in speaking at our conference to submit a session proposal with confidence that we'll be able to cover their expenses.

If you're interested, the Call For Presentations can be found at the conference web site

IBM to join PHP community!

Great news for the PHP community! IBM has decided to embrace PHP and help endorse and promote its use. IBM's endorsement further legitimizes PHP as a prime-time Web application development platform. Not only is IBM planning to make use of PHP technology but also help in furthering it by allocating R&D resources to enhance functionality including Web Services, enabling unified data handling by providing Service Data Objects to PHP, and more. IBM recognizes that being part of the PHP community means giving back in what counts, source code.
In the short term, Zend is helping IBM with providing a supported PHP distribution to their DB2 & Cloudscape installed base, where PHP adoption is still in its infancy.
I wonder how this will effect 2005's TIOBE programming language index. 2004 was a great year for PHP (and down year for Java), where PHP was chosen as the programming language of the year.