Our streaming team has been doing really great job and we already started uploading some videos from the conference.

We're still in the process of encoding and uploading, but videos for all talks in DeNA room (Day 1 and 2) and Larry Wall's keynote are now uploaded and they are embedded in the talk details page linked from the schedule, like you can see in Larry's keynote page.

The video quality varies between the room environment and camera quality but so far they look all good. If the slides are hard to read, be sure to check out the slides uploaded by the speaker (if any) to help the viewing experience.

Big thank you to Coji (dwango), lopnor, otsune and Doumae-san and Kawai-san from i-revo for their hard work recording, encoding and uploading the videos.

We first upload the video to Nico Nico Douga (you might need a registration to see the video on their site but you don't need to as long as you see on our YAPC site), and plan to upload the video to Google Video so you can easily export the video to devices such as iPhone, iPod or PSP. (Google video re-encodes all files, so if you watch them on the browser the quality is not nice, while you can download them as H.264 MP4 and it's much better)

Thank you all for coming to YAPC::Asia 2008.

We want your feeback. Take the survey so that we can make the next YAPC::Asia 2009 even better. The survey should just take 5 to 10 minutes.

We'll start the registration on 9AM. Don't forget to print out your private page for the quick check-in. If you don't have a printer, just write down your 8 digit code and that even speeds up the registration process.

For those of you who registered yesterday, don't forget your bag, especially your badge and Wi-Fi access card. We won't reissue if you lose it. You'll need Wi-Fi access card every time you want to connect to the internet because of the matrix authentication system.

On May 15th we'll open the venue and begin the registration on 9:00 AM. The first welcome session will start on 9:45, so be sure to make a buffer to finish your registration.

We don't have a conference t-shirt this year, instead we have a (very cool) eco-friendly bag for everyone.

There'll be no tickets sold at the venue. If you show up without the online registration, you can't attend to the conference. Thanks for your understanding.

Previously in YAPC::Asia we have been a bit unfriendly about food during the conference. This year it's a bit different, because we will provide food.

On 5/15, we will have sandwich and drink for lunch break.

On 5/16, we will have Cup Ramen for lunch break and some snacks for afternoon break both thanks to Yahoo! JAPAN.

There will be a limit for the number of available lunch sets. You can opt out and chose your own food in or around the venue if you want.

On the first day evening of the conference, we plan to have a conference dinner at the restaurant in Tokyo Institute of technology.

The dinner is sponsored by our sponsors, RECRUIT and livedoor and it's free.

Unfortunately, the restaurant can only contain 300 people, and we can't get you all of them in. We're really sorry for this, but we selected the 300 people eligible to attend to the party with the following rule:

• If you're a speaker or a staff, you're in.
• If you're paid and come from abroad, you're in.
• If you're paid and come from non-Tokyo area, you're in.
• Otherwise, we sort the list by the payment date.

So if you paid late, or haven't even paid yet, or attend to the conference as a sponsor employee or a press, the chances are that you are not able to attend to the dinner.

You can see your current status on your private page. If there are people canceling to attend, we'll select more people from the waiting list.

Congratulations if you're selected. We're sorry if you're not, but I hope you can form another crowd to have "Yet Another YAPC party" around the venue.

The conference is coming in a week and we're pretty much excited. Are you?

Some of you might have noticed by looking at Schedule page, but on the day before the conference, May 14th, we plan to host an arrival party. We'll have SoozyCon (a small tech talk community lead by Yappo and tokuhirom) as well as a few JavaScript talks which were not accepted on the main track but would be interesting.

We'll also do pre-registration and provide some snacks there. So if you're available on 14th night, you should come. If you're busy and can not make it, it's alright. This is not a mandatory event.

When: May 14th 18:00-
Where: The Centennial Hall 3rd Floor, Tokyo Institute of Technology ((3) of the Map: right past the main gate from Ookayama station)
Who: YAPC attendees (Free admission: Bring your check-in code for the pre-registration)
What: Miscellaneous tech talks, pre registration and snacks.

Actually, the room can only contain around 200 people. If all of you (500 people) come, we can't get all of you in. So it's basically first-come-first-serve. We'll make sure that you can still do pre-registration at the desk and get the badge etc. even if you come late though. Thanks for your understanding.

Our conference payment and registration was all done electronically, so there's no paper ticket issued. You might wonder how to authorize yourself in the conference without that. And here's how.

We've set up special elements in your private page (You need to be signed in to view the page) to display your 8-digit "check-in code" and the QR code (2 dimensional barcode).

Print this page out and bring that to the conference. We scan or quick-type your accesscode to verify your registration and you'll get attendees badge and bag. If you come without the code, it'll take more time to register yourself because we need to verify your ID which you might want to avoid.

So again, print your private page and bring it to the conference.

The schedule (program) is now out. As you see we have 3 tracks for 2 days, full of interesting talks!

Also, we opened the call for Lightning Talks. Submit a talk proposal so you can speak for 5 minutes about whatever you want to talk. The deadline is May 14th, the day before the conference, but if you want to make sure you can speak there, submit as early as possible.

Note that the Lightning Talks session is scheduled at the end of 1st day (May 15th).

We're preparing for printing nameplates for attendees. Make sure your personal information is updated and correct. We'll print out your name, nickname, company name (if any), country and perl mongers group.

Make sure the information is updated before this weekend since we're going to print them next week. Thank you.

Thanks to your voting (we've got 111 votes), we decided the 2nd round of accepted talks. They're now all announced on the schedule page.

We now have 53 talks so far. More to come for the Lightning Talks session as well as the arrival party and RejectConf on 14th night. woo hoo!

We plan to announce the program sometime next week, hopefully with the ability to schedule your own timetable.

A few weeks ago we announced the first round of accepted talks (37). We have more slots to fill and couldn't decide which talks to accept because they all look good.

Here we come up with a tiny voting app you can pick which talks you want to see.

We'll decide the 2nd round of accepted talks which would be 15 out of 35 based on your voting. Note that we won't decide solely on the vote counts because that'd likely make popular speakers talk more and others less (or none), and because we have more Japanese attendees than others, English talks will be less popular than Japanese ones, etc.

We plan to announce the final schedule sometime next week. Vote early to get your voice in! The deadline is the midnight of April 20th.

We'll sell more tickets this week.

Our plan is to selling 50 more tickets sometime this week We won't post the actual date and time so that we can avoid the slowdown of the site. Also, the plan might be changed without any notice.

If you missed the tickets and early registration, this would be your last chance. Keep your eye on the site as well as our Twitter stream.

Tickets are now sold out and the registration is closed. But people who registered but not paid yet (we call them unpaid users) can still pay, at least for a few days.

We're talking to the venue about the possiblity to increase the seats (and sell more tickets) and will update once we figure out.

Unpaid users should pay right now, except if they're one of speakers, volunteer staffs or employees of our sponsors.

# of committed users (spearks + staff + who bought tickets) is currently 343 as of this writing. We set that limit to 350 in the system. We'll close new registration when we hit that limit.

People who registered but hasn't made a payment yet should do it right now. We'll accept the payment for a few days even after we close the registration, but it won't be that long.

To rephrase, make a payment right now. If you don't have a credit card, send us a note (email to team@yapcasia.org).

We'll start selling tickets for the conference on Tuesday, March 25th 10:00am JST (= 1:00am UTC). Payments are made online using PayPal, so there's no actual paper tickets and all you need is your credit card.

The price of the tickets are 3,500 JPY for the early-bird payments (first 7 days) and 3,000 JPY for students (You need a proof of your studentship at the venue). This fee includes an access to all sessions and a schwag bag.

The # of available tickets is about 300, and we had a record of selling 300 tickets about in a week last year, so don't get late!

Note that the speakers and volunteer staff are not required to purchase the ticket.

You might have already noticed it, but our site got redesigned! Kudos to our designer Taichi Kaminogoya for the great design, again. We also like to thank Kenichi Ishigaki and drry for translating the site navigation into Japanese.

Speaking of acknowledgments, we've got plenty of sponsors this year again, as you can see on the right side of this post. To our sponsors, we appreciate all of your help to make this conference happen.

We are also happy that now the first round of accepted talks are announced. The list includes keynotes by Larry Wall and Michael Schwern.

By "first round" I mean there'll be more talks to come.

The thing is, there are lots of interesting talks on the border of accept-or-reject and it's really hard for us to decide which to accept. We still have slots for about 15 talks out of the rest 33 talks. We're planning some transparent and democratic way to make the list.

We're looking for volunteer staff for YAPC::Asia 2008.

We want 9-10 people to help: setting up venue facilities, registration desk, tracking schedule, packing bag inserts and translating slides of foreign speakers, etc.

Volunteer staff are requested to come to the venue on 5 PM May 14th and 8:30 AM May 15-16th. (It's alright if you can help us partially during three days conference, but be sure to let us know)

Volunteer staff are eligible to attend to the conference and the dinner for free .

If you're willing to help us, register yourself for the conference and email us with your profile (URL such as http://conferences.yapcasia.org/ya2008/user/XXXXX) and what and when you can help us.

The deadline for the CFP is February 25th, this upcoming Monday. We have plenty of slots available yet, so go hurry and submit your talks to get a free speaker badge!

As a side note, we welcome talks about JavaScript as well, in addition to the obvious anything related to Perl.

To keep YAPC::Asia a low-cost conference and hence accessible to all types of engineers and developers out there, we need support from private sponsors.

We have various levels of sponsorship plans. If you're interested in sponsoring YAPC::Asia, contact us at team[at]yapcasia.org for details.

YAPC::Asia 2008 committee is pleased to announce that YAPC::Asia 2008 will happen on May 15-16th 2008 at Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Attending to the conference will cost 4000 JPY (we're planning academic discount) including our original schwag bag. We'll make the payment system ready around March 1st when you can pay the conference using PayPal credit card transaction.

We're also announcing Call For Presentations and early registration today.

We are looking for 20 and 40 minutes presentations. Register the conference and submit your proposals via the web form. Make sure you include a title for your presentation, an abstract, a language of the talk (English or Japanese), and the amount of time that you think you will need for the presentation. Feel free to submit multiple proposals if you want to increase your chance to speak.

The deadline for the submissions is February 25th, 2008. We'll make a call for Five minutes Lightning Talks in late April, when the conference gets close.