Vendors at PyCon

We have always had sponsors at PyCon. In exchange for their generous financial support, sponsors get various forms of exposure (detailed here). All sponsors have the opportunity to supply inserts for the conference tote bag (including insert-only sponsorship).

In previous years some PyCon sponsors have put out marketing & recruiting information on tables in the hall, and some have had representatives stationed in the halls for face time with attendees. This year we made four official vendor tables available in a vendor-specific area, adjacent to the main hallway. All four vendor tables have been reserved:

Elegant Stitches of Conway, AR is a vendor of embroidered garments and accessories. Janet Lindstrom will be selling polo shirts, long-sleeved denim shirts, 1/4 zip sweatshirts, and caps, all embroidered with the Python logo; T-shirts and cubicle posters with a "Zen of Python" design; and travel mugs with handles featuring the Python logo. Elegant Stitches is also supplying PyCon's official attendee & staff T-shirts as well as the conference tote bags.

Wingware will feature their Wing Python IDE at their table. John Ehresman and Stephan Deibel, the developers of Wing IDE and co-founders of the company, will be at the table about half of the time, attending talks the rest. They will show off Wingware's Python IDE on their laptops, take feature requests, answer questions, and just talk with users and developers about anything people might be interested in: GUI toolkits, the packaging of a commercial Python product, the relationship between commercial and open source, you name it. It's an opportunity for people to learn about their product and to interact with the developers of a commercial Python-based GUI application. Wingware is also a Gold sponsor this year.

Google will have engineers at their table to answer questions, provide free goodies and hand out recruiting materials. Google is also a Platinum sponsor this year.

ITA Software is actively recruiting Python developers. Their first product is an airfare pricing and low fare search engine, that is used by most major airlines and online travel agencies to power their web sales. They're now building an entire airline reservation system, with Air Canada as their first customer. A number of their engineers will be attending and will be available off and on at their table, and they'll be demonstrating "a very cool application we built, called Q-earth, that uses our data to show animations of all the world's flights in 'real time'." ITA Software is also a Platinum sponsor this year.

Please plan a visit to the vendor tables while at PyCon!