Many congratulations to Laura Thomson of OmniTI for her promotion to principal responsible for the "Customer Engagement Experience".

From the official press release:

As principal, Thomson is responsible for ensuring that OmniTI builds and delivers the most appropriate web-based solutions to meet the specific requirements of each client. Thomson's new role has expanded to include guaranteeing optimal quality during every OmniTI customer engagement. This includes ensuring that all client solutions are scalable, highly secure and able to perform on a level that exceeds customer expectations. She is also responsible for growing OmniTI's web development and client services teams as well as internal training.

Laura has authored the book "PHP and MySQL Web Development" (best seller) and co-authored the book "MySQL Tutorial". For more information about OmnitTI and the services they (and Laura bring to the table, check out their website.

Laura Thomson is reporting back over on her blog with the latest from her experiences at this year's OSCON, mentioning today the "Lightening Talks" that she and George Schlossnagle are doing on Wednesday.

On Wednesday George and I are moderating the PHP Lightning talks at OSCON. The Perl ones have been running for years and are a lot of fun.

If you have something PHP related to talk about, please come and talk to us about it. The talks are really short (5 minutes) and minimal preparation is required. If you have never given a conference talk before, this is a great way to start. Or, if you've given lots of talks but really need to rant about something, this is your opportunity.

If you're there and have a topic you'd like to hear about during the talks, drop them a line at lightningtalks-oscon2006@omniti.com with the topic and a short summary.