Speakers

Shivam Singh

Shivam Singh

Shivam is a Senior Software Engineer with BlogVault. He spends most of his time glued to a computer writing codes directly/indirectly related to WordPress.

He has been using WordPress for 7 years now, and has authored popular plugins and a private theme. One of the core organizers of Bengaluru WordPress Community, he adores the idea of a strong community and never misses an opportunity to contribute. His contributions include – writing for the WordPress Handbook, blogging his experiences, and contributing questions/answers on StackOverflow. Helping people at Happiness Bars is his favourite WordCamp thing.

At BlogVault he has had the opportunity to lead a number of development projects which have further helped shape his understanding of WordPress. Inspired by the ‘State of the Word 2015’, he spent the better part for his last year learning and creating web applications on ReactJS.

When not online, Shivam may be found riding his bike, hiking and photographing a new trail or sleeping.

Insights on Shivam’s talk: “State of WordPress Security: Today and beyond”

WordPress is huge. One of the greatest things about WordPress is that it’s open source; which also means that it is really well understood. WordPress powers more than 25% of the web and it’s steadily moving towards the 30% mark. Thousands of third-party plugins and themes are available. All these points that make WordPress great, also make WordPress extremely vulnerable to hacking. Also, the scale and complexity of WordPress provides for a large attack surface.

The WordPress team is invested in maintaining the integrity of the application, and all core related security issues are quickly addressed. However the same cannot be said for thousands of plugins/themes out there which makes WordPress vulnerable.

Being in the backup business, Shivam and his team have spent a lot of time helping customers restore and clean their hacked sites. All this experience and learning was later translated into code that empowers their new product.

Shivam will be sharing some important takeaways from this experience in his talk.

  • Why will anyone hack you?
  • What are the common hacks?
  • How to prevent one’s sites against them?
  • Analyzing security related data collected from over 100K WordPress sites.

The talk will discuss what these data mean to the WordPress ecosystem in current times and what can it lead to in the future.

Amit Singh

Amit Singh

Amit Singh is a founder and CEO of WPoets. He has been working with WordPress since 2007, and contributed his first WordPress plugin to WordPress.org repository in 2008.

He has helped organize PHPCamp, WordCamp, Joomla Day and Drupal camp in Pune. He firmly believes that instead of coding websites, we should now be able to assemble them, and is working towards that goal with Awesome Studio plugin. You can follow him on Twitter @thecancerus

Amit Singh is Panelist for “How to build a business on WordPress” Panel discussion!

Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/thecancerus

Rahul Bansal

Rahul Bansal

Rahul is Founder & CEO of rtCamp, which is first and only WordPress.com VIP partner from Asia.

He started using WordPress in 2007, released his first WordPress plugin in 2008 and started rtCamp, the first WordPress-only agency in India, in 2009.

He is involved in many open-source WordPress projects, notably rtMedia, and EasyEngine, both in use on thousands of active sites.

Apart from contributing codes, he spoke at many WordCamps and other tech conferences including the inaugural Nginx conference in San Francisco in 2014.

He is also a WordCamp Pune organizer and involved in WordPress Marathi and Hindi translation.

He is always looking for more ways to give back to the WordPress community.

Rahul is one of Panelist for “How to build a business on WordPress” Panel discussion!

Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/rahul286

Sanjeev Mishra

Sanjeev Mishra

Sanjeev Mishra is an award winning serial entrepreneur running multiple online businesses on WordPress with 6 figure income.

He left his 9 to 5 job in year 2008 and started using WordPress as a blogging platform. His experience on content writing, business development ideas around WordPress and running a distributed company on WordPress can be helpful to many people.

He is the founder of WebFanzine Media which is the parent company of the largest WordPress carousel portal named SliderVilla and most popular documentation plugin named Documentor. He is also the founder of PurposeThemes, the largest multi-author WordPress theme review portal with 2,000+ premium and free themes. He spends most of his time on marketing these products and helping new people getting on the most popular CMS platform i.e. WordPress. Sometimes he blogs on Internet Techies which servers 300K+ visitors per month.

Sanjeev will share his experience on how he successfully runs his business on WordPress in “How to build a business on WordPress” Panel discussion!

Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/clickonf5

Deepak Kori

Deepak Kori

Deepak Kori is a web hosting enthusiast with more than a decade of web hosting and digital marketingbackground. He has worked with several web hosting companies as a digital marketing head. He had akeen interest in starting his own venture, stepped into entrepreneurship by starting the web hostingcompany MilesWeb with his two friends in 2012. As the co-founder of web hosting company MilesWeb, he is responsible for the day-to- day running and management of the company. His expertize is in Content marketing, Social Media, Adwords, Analytics, SEO, Marketing Communication, Blogging,Affiliates, Sales, UX Design and customer relationship.

He got introduced to WordPress in 2006 when it was just known as only a blogging platform. He is a regular member of Nashik meet up group and attended few WordCamps in India. His company is a strong supporter of WordPress and continues to sponsor WordCamp across India.

Deepak is a Panelist in “How to build a business on WordPress” Panel discussion!

Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/deepakkori

Vishal Kothari

Vishal Kothari

Vishal Kothari is the Founder & CEO of Tyche Softwares, a leading WooCommerce plugins provider that has carved a niche for itself in the WordPress plugins space. Vishal has been building web solutions since 2001. He has worked on a wide range of platforms like C++, Flash, Symbian & Linux with core expertise in PHP. He is the author of a dozen plugins for WordPress & WooCommerce.

Apart from steering his team through different situations, Vishal has a very sharp focus on Customer Service. He wants to ensure that every client has a delightful experience while interacting with his team.

You will find Vishal sharing his views on “How to build a business on WordPress” Panel Discussion!

Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishal-kothari-78663a4

Ankit K Gupta

Ankit Gupta

Ankit K Gupta is a Lead Quality Test Engineer with BuddyBoss.

Ankit was a computer lecturer in Delhi based college and still loves to train new hires in his team. He loves interacting with beginners and help people by exchanging knowledge. He started his career as a Software Tester in 2013 with rtCamp that worked on WordPress.

His mission is to make sure the WordPress experience for everyone is bug-free and good. This has got him contributing to the WordPress project as a core contributor for every version from 4.0 to the latest 4.6.

Not satisfied with just core contributions, he also translation contributor and editor on the Hindi Polyglot team for WordPress and contributor of BuddyPress and bbPress plugins as well. He also has recently started contributing to the WordPress Docs team.

You can get to know Ankit’s views on Contributing to WordPress in “Contribution to WordPress” Panel discussion!

Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/ankitguptaindia

Bigul Malayi

Bigul Malayi

Bigul is from Kozhikode, Kerala. He started his career as a core PHP developer in 2005. In 2008 he came across WordPress and a year later, he was developing WordPress websites for clients. Since January of 2012, he’s been working as a QA Analyst with OnTheGoSystems.

Bigul credits WordPress as his bread and butter. To return the favor, he frequently speaks and educates users about WordPress.

Bigul Malayi is one of Panelist for “Contribution to WordPress” Panel discussion!

Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/bigul-malayi-1a729539

Vachan Kudmule

Vachan Kudmule
Vachan Kudmule became an entrepreneur in 2002, at 17, when he started his firm KDC (Krazy Devil Creationz). It has grown into a full-fledged web solutions agency.

He’s studied architecture and started his second firm KDC Inc in 2006 which provides architecture and interior design solutions. He ventured into eCommerce Consulting in 2009 and started KDC Pay which assists startups in building full fledged eCommerce sites with Payment Gateway accruing and integration.

At present Vachan is involved with all the three while also heading the design and technology teams for White Shadows, a digital marketing agency.

Vachan’s motto is “everything can and must be designed” thus is screen name ‘Dezine.Ninja’. He’s passionate about FOSS (Free Open Source Software) and helping start-ups grow their business.

Self learning and exploring new ideas keeps him motivated and he has pioneered many industry first concepts in alternative access mediums. He’s presently experimenting with Native Mobile App Development.

You can see Vachan expressing his views on “Contribution to WordPress” Panel discussion as a Panelist!

Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/vachan

Aditya Kane

Aditya Kane
Aditya loves open source projects and it’s philosophy with a passion. He has been using WordPress for over seven years now. Over the years he has used WordPress as a technology blogger and also led marketing strategies along with community outreach and engagement of WordPress based services and products.

He is now the co-founder of Yapapaya, a new WordPress agency where he works as its Chief Culture Officer.

Along with being a co-organizer of WordCamp Mumbai since 2014, he also contributes time at WordCamp Central in vetting and mentoring WordPress communities from around the world.

Aditya is one of the Panelist for “Contribution to WordPress” Panel discussion!

Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/adityakane

Swapnil Patil

Swapnil Patil
Swapnil Patil started his WordPress journey back in Jan 2014; his passion for WordPress started at the college itself. Luckily right after the college, he got an opportunity to be at a place, where 100% of work involved WordPress!
He hasn’t look back after that, having enjoyed each moment of his professional life.

Got immense happiness in giving back the community, by co-organizing WordCamp Pune, publishing a couple of plugins, Being a GTE of Marathi WordPress Project, and contributing to the core WordPress recently.

Currently, he is working as a Front-end Developer, mainly concentrating on WordPress, He is also GTE for Marathi WordPress project.

You will find him sharing his thoughts in “Contribution to WordPress” Panel discussion!

Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/patilswapnilv

Alexander Gounder

Alexander Gounder

Alex is an SEO / SEM & Internet Marketer with a wide variety of work experience across industries and domains like Films, TV Production, Customer Service, Politics, Government Operations, Press Relations, Video Games, Casual Gaming, Mobile, Graphic & Web Design.

He runs a digital agency in Mumbai called Ink my web, Other than Inbound Marketing it focuses on developing websites using WordPress. He is an Organizer for WordCamp Mumbai and Volunteer with WordCamp Central.

Alex will moderate the “Contribution to WordPress” Panel discussion!

Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/agounder

Nirav Mehta

Nirav Mehta

Nirav is called the entrepreneur geek. One who likes technology as much as businesses.

He’s built a rather eventful track record over the last 17 years. To summarize: he started at the age of 13, launched India’s first electronic magazine, a thriving web agency that went down in 2009, was asked to exit the company, made a heroic return and recovery, then a string of seven businesses, doing multiple product businesses in parallel, authored two – actually three – books, spoke at various events and conferences, contributed to open source and community, wrote some fancy code and got gray hair at early age.

He is a “parallel entrepreneur” leading multiple technology businesses and adventures. You can learn more about his WordPress solutions from: StorApps, Icegram and WPMeta

But hey, numbers and all the claim-to-fame apart, what’s most important about him is that he loves to contribute. He is easily approachable and has a lot of experience. So if you have any questions about WordPress, WooCommerce; starting up, running or scaling a tech business, he’d love to help!

Insights on Nirav’s talk: “Winning With WooCommerce”

WooCommerce has become the most popular e-commerce platform in a quick five years. But can it solve your business needs? If you are already running WooCommerce, how can you amplify your results?

If you are new to WooCommerce, this fast paced session will get you up to speed with the basics. Then you will discover neat techniques to grow your sales, increase customer engagement, effectively managing day to day tasks and make your dreams come true!

Whether you are evaluating WooCommerce or already using it, this information rich talk will fill your mind with new ideas that you’d want to go out and implement right away! It’s based on extensive experience so you will get no-fluff practical solutions.

You will also get ample opportunity to ask your questions – until the organizers go wild. And after that, we can always go off stage, outside the hall and answer your remaining questions.

Because it’s all about winning with WooCommerce!

Come prepared!

Start with following him on Twitter @niravmehta!

Dinesh Jain

Dinesh Jain

Meet Dinesh Jain, Dinesh is a Certified ScrumMaster® and has been a part of Organizing team of Pune WordCamp 2015.

Dinesh began leveraging WordPress right after graduation in 2012 and he has not looked back since. The manifold features of WordPress and the flexibility it provides has had Dinesh firmly glued and his attachment to the WordPress CMS is growing stronger with time.

From a novice level to acquiring expertise, he has evolved his skillset to also managing large scale projects in WordPress. Dinesh has been a vibrant part of the WordPress Community and has contributed to its open source community in myriad ways.

Dinesh was a speaker at Wordcamp Mumbai 2012 and also was a member of the Organizing Committee of Wordcamp Pune 2015. He is an enthusiastic attendee of WordCamps. At present, he is the VP of Services in Armentum, which is a full service digital agency and an emerging player in WordPress and based out of its Bangalore Development Center.

His Areas of expertise are:

  • WordPress Development
  • Project Management
  • Agile Methodology

Highlights on Dinesh Jain’s talk: OSCAR – A growth driven methodology for managing WordPress projects

  • Currently there are scores of project management methodologies available but almost all of them are either built for enterprise level or are difficult to manage. Hence the intuitive need to have a simple methodology which follows Agile and easy to manage for all genres whether they are freelancers, start ups, small or large businesses.
  • Why look into another one when there are a plethora of Project Management Methodologies present. The main purpose behind OSCAR is that it unifies user experience, development and customer acquisition. By leveraging OSCAR, an agency or a freelancer is able to de-commoditize their offering and continue to earn revenue for a client on a retainer basis that goes beyond support.
  • OSCAR helps companies build a revenue engine with no overhead costs as well as using the project management methods in an effective manner for smooth execution of the projects.


The Talk includes:

  • Why Project Management Methodology is essential for a WordPress project
  • Existing Methodologies and hindrances caused.
  • Understanding each phase of OSCAR methodology:

    • Objective
    • Strategy

      • Building a Baseline
      • Understanding “Why”
      • Defining “What”
      • Defining “How”
    • Create

      • User Experience and Interface
      • Code Wrangling
      • Content Development
      • Marketing and Sales Automation Engine
    • Analyze

      • Performance Measurement
      • Performance Analysis
    • Refine

      • Update based on performance measurements and analysis
      • Implement Product Roadmap Features
      • Follow Content Calendar For Content Development
    • Tools for each phase of OSCAR methodology
    • Advantages and Derivatives of using OSCAR for Freelancers and Agencies.


    How it will help the audience:

    • Non-Technical (Business Owners, Business Analytics, Business Development Managers)
    • Technical (Developers, Freelancers)

    Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/dineshjain2911

Jayman Pandya

Jayman Pandya

Meet Jayman Pandya, With an experience of over a decade, Jayman has worked in lead roles of Design with companies like Bhujbal Knowledge City, Zee Entertainment, ICICI, J.P. Morgan, Leo Burnett. He has also worked with companies like Roche Pharma, Abbott Pharma, Boehringer Ingelheim, Johnson & Johnson, Axis Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Mahindra Agri, Godrej, Legrand, EndemolShine, 9X Media, HDFC Bank as independent consultant on their various projects.

Jayman has been working with WordPress since 2008 when he pitched it for the first time to his client “9X Media” for a portal. Today he has more than 40 sites under his belt built of WordPress (with the help of a development team) and have built things like Twitter Consolidation App, Lead Management System on top of WordPress.

After attending a few WordPress meetups and talking with some seasoned WordPress developers, he decided to apply to talk at WordCamp Nashik.

Apart from this, Jayman has an experience of taking UX/UI, RWD workshops with his clients.

Highlights on Jayman Pandya’s talk: “The BuzzWord ‘UX’, Why it is so Important?”

His Lightening talk, will move on explaining what experience and how the empathy is to the core to have a good User Experience. To support his statements, he will walk through with 3 examples

  • Angry Person

    • This example will iterate about hexadec error codes or white screen of death in WordPress.
    • He will also introduce programmers to the concept of empathy, talk about the psychological importance of the same and why they need to be empathetic.
    • WordPress Example: WordPress now lets you to select the language before installation is an amazing example of empathy. They analysis on what users are doing with the product and how WordPress acted to make it better.
  • User is like your GrandParent

    • This example will highlight on how assumptions are major culprits, when it comes to destroying the usability of any product.
    • A real world example would be like helping an old person cross the road and then move to tech examples like giving coach marks to user on how to use a product.
  • User is a Kindergarten student

    • This example will emphasize on the importance of making the product more playful, while focusing on function with an example of how Kindergarten’s use games and play activities to teach kids. He will follow this up with an example of gamification by Apple Watch to make you more active over a period of time.
    • He will also talk about Customizer in WordPress as a beautiful example of gamification and Visual Composer as a bad example of gamification.

Linkedin Profile: www.linkedin.com/in/jaymanpandya

Fairy Dharawat

Fairy Dharawat

Fairy Dharawat is a writer by profession who has dabbled in stand-up comedy and performance poetry, She believes in focusing on little details when it comes to writing impactful tales which could move your readers.

After conducting workshops on stories, and being part of a story group called Katha Kosa for more than 2 years, Fairy Dharawat is convinced she has barely scratched the surface when it comes to writing remarkable stories ready to dominate the world.

She recently started Stories4hire,a space dedicated to documenting her tryst with stories. Mumbai WordCamp 2016 was her debut where she did a talk on – How to write humor. The response was fantastic!

Glimpse on Fairy’s talk: “Engage your readers via Stories”.

Humans understand stories better. A useful tool to impart knowledge as its visual, stories also helps us bring clarity in our communications. While the blog is a front face, technical talent handles the background show. It becomes important for them to see what is the end product. Their expertise in the background coupled with working knowledge on how to write will give them a competitive advantage.

For Bloggers, writers, She’ll share fundamentals of stories, and how it can be incorporated into their writing to make their blogs more interesting which can help them get a higher reach, and bring engagement with their users. For beginners, She’ll introduce tools to help them in writing. She’ll also share a bit on SEO, which can guide them to write for users, keeping in mind certain key points.

So the talk is going to focus on;

  • How to write a story. A brief on stories. A beginning a middle and an end. A formulaic approach, and follow the rule. Understand the rule thoroughly and then break the rule by knowing about characters, story arc, plot, conflict, and resolution.
  • How to write a blog. The topic of your blog. Writing posts related to your blog. Topics for your posts. How to choose image/s. Tools to use for your Images/URL/SEO
  • How to add a story into your blog. Narrate it in the first person. Add anecdotes. Tie it up together.
  • How to make your story more engaging. Using action words. Experimenting with chronology. More moments. Character back stories. Conflict and resolution.

Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fairy-dharawat-88435a20

Anand Thakkar

Anand Thakkar

Anand Thakkar is a Senior Developer working with Hidden Brains Infotech Pvt. Ltd. An Ahmedabad based Web & Mobile Apps Development Company.

He is associated with the WordPress development from last 5 years. He even started his career as a WordPress Developer and now works on multiple Web & Mobile technologies. Apart from WordPress Development, he holds a great command over Core php, Codeignator, CakePHP, Angular JS too. Anand also holds a Zend Certification for php 5.3

Anand is a Traveler. He travels to different destinations on the name conferences. He simply looks for a reason to get away and explore a new city. Apart from traveling, he likes to watch movie and is a big time foodie. It is quite possible that you encounter him on a food stall next to the WordCamp.

Anand will be providing a lightning talk about the “Automated Testing in WordPress Eco System”

As all we know that WordPress business has transformed widely from Only Service Centric to Product Centric approach. With changes, it will be challenging to provide quality in the Product Based Industry as always. Anand will quickly explain stuff regarding the “Automated Testing”; why it is useful to adept TDD [ Test Driven Development ] approach and how it can impact your Product/Service Quality?

  • Types of testing involved in WordPress Development
  • Short intro about the QUnit and PHPUnit
  • Setup the basic test case for your WordPress Plugin and/or Theme
  • Where to get started further
  • Pros and Cons involved with the TDD.

Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/anandthakkar

Saurabh Shukla

Saurabh Shukla

Saurabh is the Chief Strategy Officer at Yapapaya and Chief Mentor at BaapWP.me. He understands freedom as having control on one’s own life and hence is fascinated by the GPL. He really feels that open source morality and the internet can solve a lot of India’s problems, especially the ones related to education and livelihood.

WordPress as an open source, democratic, self-controlled publishing system is very important to him and he writes, talks about, teaches and works with WordPress in various technical and non-technical ways.

Saurabh will share his experience in the WordPress ecosystem, in his “Marketing Lessons I learnt from the WordPress community”. talk.

He still likes to be called a WordPress developer but his role has increasingly tilted towards marketing and strategy in the past few years. He has managed products and dabbled at marketing before he took up development full-time.

In 2014, he started getting active in the WordPress ecosystem and eventually led the organizing of WordCamp Pune 2015. In this period, he was able to create successful, non-intrusive promotional campaigns for various WordPress related activities (especially WordCamp Pune).

He has been Working since he was 18, so he has been Working for 16 years now and have seen different sales and marketing tactics in his career in different executive and managerial roles in multiple industries.

Highlights on Saurabh Shukla’s talk: “Marketing Lessons I learnt from the WordPress community”.

Saurabh will be going to compare and contrast concepts behind some commonly prescribed marketing tactics/strategies with some proven engagement strategies that He learnt from the WordPress ecosystem.

While the topic is definitely business oriented, it will have insights and examples that are useful both for individuals and organizations. The concepts are simple and can be grasped by anyone with zero marketing skills as well.

Outline:

  • Introduction.
  • Contextual Conversations vs Sales Funnels.
  • Cultural Transparency vs Self Promotion.
  • Resource Entities vs People.
  • A note on Goal Orientation.
  • Conclusion.

WordPress.org Profile: https://profiles.wordpress.org/saurabhshukla

Harshal Limaye

Harshal Limaye

Meet Harshal Limaye, Harshal is a Nagpur based Web Developer, blogger and a internet addict. He is using WordPress for building websites and web based applications for about 3 years now and loves to explore possibilities with WordPress and take it to the next level.

He will help you to know, How one can Excel in WordPress APIs, in his “WordPress APIs: Do more with less code.” talk.

WordPress comes bundled with many different APIs. These APIs are gateways which let you to interact, customize and extend the features of WordPress without disturbing any of existing WordPress files or functionality.

The goal of this session is to provide a gentle introduction to some of the most commonly used WordPress APIs that can be utilized by developers and site admins to make their life easy, How WordPress stores metadata inside the database, Adding, updating, retrieving and deleting the metadata information and finally he’ll take a look at the core WordPress code that drives the metadata API and how one can use it to create own custom meta tables to take your WordPress projects to the next level.

WordPress APIs: The APIs which Harshal be covering are as follows:

1. Plugin API – Hooks, Actions and Filters:
When beginners needs to perform a specific task what they usually do is they copy and paste a specific code snippet which they got from stackoverflow or from a random blog and paste it inside their functions.php file. However, most of them are unaware of the way that code snippet works. In this section, I’ll provide quick overview of What WordPress hooks are and How developers can utilize them to write more efficient code.

2. Shortcode API:
Shortcodes are one of the most simple and easy to use features in WordPress. In this section, I’ll cover, How users can create their own custom shortcodes which can be useful to insert variety of content into their WordPress website.

3. Dashboard Widget API:
This is one of the most overlooked features of WordPress. This can be very helpful, for branding or display custom information to users when he logs into his WordPress Dashboard. In this section, I’ll cover, how developers can utilize WordPress Dashboard widgets API to create custom WordPress dashboard widgets.

4. Options API:
One of the most popular API available in WordPress used to create, fetch, update, and delete options in a simple and standardized way. WP plugins, themes, and even WordPress itself, holds lot of data in form of options inside the database that matters to your WordPress website. Knowing how you can use or update these in a plugin or theme of very important. In this section, I’ll provide a quick overview of this API, which can be helpful to beginners to get started with this API.

5. Metadata API:
Metadata API is one of the primary reasons which make WordPress a powerful CMS. It allows the users to store custom fields inside WordPress database. This feature is widely used by plugins to store and update information.In this section, I will cover various ways of working with WordPress post meta data

Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/harshal-limaye-a6b2479a

Hari Shanker R

Hari Shanker R

WordPress is handy tool for startups and small businesses looking to quickly launch new media products. Hari Shanker will help you, on how One can start his own Startup on WordPress in his “WordPress for Startups” talk.

Hari Shanker is a passionate WordPress enthusiast, Hari is currently employed as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic (The company best known for WordPress.com & more).
Hari’s association with WordPress dates back to 2007 – when he first discovered it as a college student at Government Engineering College, Trivandrum.

Little did he realize that the association would grow into a lifelong passion! This exhorted Hari to pursue WordPress development and support as a career after college, as WordPress Project Manager for a startup, where he oversaw the design, development and deployment of nearly 50+ WordPress websites for diverse clients including Fortune 500 companies.

The passion for WordPress eventually led him to Automattic, where he currently engineers happiness for customers using WooCommerce – the eCommerce plugin for WordPress from Automattic, which powers 39% of all eCommerce stores. Even though Hari is familiar with WordPress theme and plugin development, his expertise lies in providing WordPress support & consulting, which also happens to be his day-job.

A seasoned public speaker, Hari has delivered several talks about WordPress, Blogging, Open Source Software at different venues including National Institute of Technology Calicut and at NASSCOM-supported events.

A runner-up of the 2011 Mindful Leadership by the University of Dayton, Ohio, Hari is also a Stringer with the national newspaper – The Hindu, where he contributes features on topics Technology, Startups and Youth, among others.

Glimpse on Hari Shanker’s talk: “WordPress for Startups”

India is currently undergoing an entrepreneurship boom of sorts – with special emphasis on Technology Startups. Any technology startup requires a set of powerful technology products – both as a tool to build the startup, and as a means to an end, to provide services to bring revenue to sustain the startup; something that only WordPress can achieve.

With its extensive presence (26% of the web is currently powered by WordPress), and an-ever growing community, not to mention its easy learning curve and extensibility, WordPress offers a melange of solutions for business-owners. The talk assumes a two-pronged approach; viz to explore diverse realms of offering WordPress services/setting up a WordPress agency and to use WordPress as a tool to build your company and/or your software tool. I intend to do the same through case studies of successful companies who have achieved this, to display the true power of WordPress, through an interactive session.

Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harishanker

Sandeep Kelvadi

Sandeep Kelvadi

Meet Sandeep Kelvadi, He will talk about “Website/Product Positioning – The Why, What and How?”

Sandeep is a marketing strategist at Pixelmattic a WordPress agency that crafts intelligent websites for smart businesses. He help clients navigate the digital landscape by helping them develop an online strategy for the website with the content at its core.

He is Co-founder at DreamNotion Innovations since 2010 where we developed their first product, a gamified social learning platform called XPlore, Wide-ranging experience in a dynamic, growth stage start-up company as a Manager for Sales & Marketing Operations designing and developing sales workflows on Salesforce CRM.

Sandeep also run’s Slidetap an app design studio under the DreamNotion umbrella, that aims to bridge the gap between technology and design by creating designs that are beautiful and practical.

He handled Customer Support & loyalty at various points, assisted in marketing campaigns and conducted product training for customers and staff.

Insight on Sandeep’s talk: “Website/Product Positioning – The Why, What and How?”

  • What is Positioning – It’s not what you do to a product, but what you do to the mind of the prospect.
  • Why is it important – Differentiating yourself from competition, standing out in a crowd, simplifies marketing/sales conundrums.
  • How do you position a company/product? – Choosing the right name, marketing tactics, case studies and looking at a WordPress specific examples.
  • How do you position yourself and your career? – How building a personal brand can help your career and business prospects.
  • How does positioning help a blogger, WordPress developer and a WordPress company

Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandeepkelvadi