The KDE marketing group is pleased to announce the release of
SpreadKDE.org, the new home for KDE's promotional activities.
Such a hub for marketing activities has been sorely lacking in KDE
until now, and we consider this site a to be a key milestone in
establishing a solid foundation in growing KDE's promotional activity.

The KDE Marketing Working Group has formed, after being proposed by the KDE community at aKademy 2005, with the aim of improving KDE's marketing and promotion efforts. Martijn Klingens, Sebastian Kügler and Wade Olson will be taking the lead in coordinating and implementing new practices, such as promoting releases more widely and running more exciting events booths. An initial charter has been created and approved by KDE e.V with the long-term goal of "coherent and strategic messaging around KDE". The group is currently focused on establishing infrastructure and prioritizing tasks.

The K Desktop Environment was pleased to see its users recently at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Users were excited to learn about KDE 4.0, some of the hot new stuff in KDE 3.5, and thousands of Linux users got out of the house for a change!

The K Desktop Environment project will again be present with a booth at the LinuxWorld Expo being held in San Francisco August 9 through 11. We'll be at booth #2038, upstairs, in the new Moscone building! We'll be demonstrating not only KDE 3.4, but also the upcoming KDE 3.5 and even maybe bits and pieces of what will become the revolutionary turning of the Gear KDE 4.0. We'd be pleased to welcome you.

Issue 2 of the Free Software Magazine contains two articles by KDE promo member Tom Chance. In Guerrilla Marketing he discusses how KDE's promotion efforts compare to those of other Free Software projects while his interview with Bernhard Reiter, conducted at aKademy last year, discusses marketing in government and software freedom on the desktop.

This week Bull Netherlands announced on their website that they will offer services on the KDE desktop. A large and public company providing KDE support is something many KDE users (and, more importantly, potential users) will be very interested in. The Dutch KDE Team has translated the original announcement to English.

This month I had the opportunity to speak about KDE, what KDE is doing to move into the enterprise, and present a case study of a company who moved from a Microsoft Windows platform to Linux and KDE. The presentation was at Real World Linux in Toronto, and Robert Brodie of Display Works Inc. joined me to talk about their migration experiences. The slides are finally available online, both mine and Robert's. In addition, the original OOImpress document of my slides is online.

You might know me as the original author of Kopete, the instant messanger for KDE. This week I have some news from Chile where after having reclaimed the kde.cl domain and having organized the site with the help of Matias Fernandez, hard work to promote KDE has begun. I was invited to talk about open source at a very important business conference organized by Entel -- perhaps the most important telecommunications company of Chile. Read on for details about the event, including pictures, and also news of a new GPL'ed Enterprise Resource Planner (ERP) dubbed ZERP with a KDE UI appropriately dubbed KERP!

At first I was thinking to title this report, "Report: KDE at Comdex". You're thinking, well, that's what you did. Big deal. However, I then changed my mind and started to write a report entitled "Microsoft is Afraid". I think this is the most appropriate title. Then I realized that no-one would know what the real topic is, so I changed it back.

Do you like KDE and its applications? Don't hesitate to tell the world. A good possibility is the 2003 Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards where voting is now running. "Linux Journal, the leading magazine of the Linux community, is pleased to announce that voting in the 2003 Readers' Choice poll is officially underway. Make your vote count as you tell us your favorite distribution, development tools, LJ column and much more." Voting closes July 25. The winners will be published in the November issue of Linux Journal, which will probably come out a few weeks after the KDE Contributor's Conference wraps up.