Tired of hearing about the ever-so... nebulous "Cloud" and what vendors say it will do for humankind? Yeah, us too. So, why won't it just go away? We found some folks who have used the cloud successfully to strike it big and asked them to show us why it made such a big difference to them. We were surprised, and now we're going to share it with you.

The event is virtual, so you can attend no matter where you are. The cost is $50 USD for a single ticket, $24 USD for php|architect subscribers and $100 USD for an "office party". Speakers for the event include Sean Coates (of Gimmie Bar), Kirsten Jones & Jeremy Johnstone and Marcus Whitney. You can find out more information and register for your ticket on the php|architect site.

In partnership with Microsoft Philippines, PHP User Group Philippines presents PHP Developers Summit 2010 on January 30th. We are inviting you to come and join us in this gathering of the country's best tech-talents, professionals and web developers promoting the use of PHP and open source solutions in the enterprise and schools.

Speakers include Dominick Nowell A. Danao, Rodney C. Jao, Alec Joseph Rivera and Rick Bahague, Jr. on topics from IIS7, Git, the WinCache extension and scaling web applications. There's still time to register if you'd like to reserve your spot. The event is happening in the Grand Ballroom at the Hotel Rembrandt and will cost between 1,200-1,500 PHP to attend this one-day event.

About a month ago I visited Microsoft's Web Developers Summit to come and talk with many other people from the PHP Community on how to get closer together and make the PHP experience better on Windows and with other Microsoft products. Although I was quite skeptical about the whole event and was slightly worried about it having only marketing and brainwashing sessions I set off just after php|works to Redmond (or actually Bellevue).

He talks briefly about each day, highlighting some of the presentations (some that talked to the attendees and some that just talked at them) as well as some of the technologies that were introduced and updated.

This past week I was invited, along with several other members of the PHP community (Wez Furlong, Gabor Hojtsy, Helgi þormar, Sean Coates, Paul Reinheimer, Ben Ramsey, Elizabeth Smith, Josh Eichorn, and still more besides), to attend a small gathering in the pacific north-west. No, it wasn't a lumberjack version of "Burning Man" involving peyote and naked drumming (you can imagine Paul's disappointment), it was a "Web Development Summit" hosted by the evil empire Microsoft.

She talks about the reception they had the first night, the sessions that had been set up for the attendees to get glimpses of Microsoft's offerings and come of the time the group spent outside of the event (including a few bug fixes along the way).

Microsoft has invited us to their main campus in an effort to reach out to the PHP community to solicit opinions and feedback on various technologies, including IIS, Silverlight, their Ajax library, Expression Web, etc.