The NeedForSpeed sprint is being sponsored by two organizations, both of whom were also sponsors of PyCon DC 2006 in Addison, TX. Both companies see Python's superiority as a strategic advantage in their markets, and therefore have commercial interests in improving the language's performance. Both companies are far-sighted enough to believe that open contributions to open source projects are the most effective way to reach their performance goals.

EWT, LLC is a proprietary securities trading company formed to capitalize on the shift of the securities industry in the United States and abroad towards electronic trading platforms. EWT's trading systems combine trading expertise and algorithmic models to produce technologies that provide superior trading performance for a broad range of securities.

The combination of scalable technologies, sustainable trading strategies and a commitment to the staff who help to achieve EWT's exceptional performance is intended to fuel the company's growth into a premier liquidity provider on all major domestic and international exchanges.

CCP hf. is the producer of EVE online, a massively mutiplayer game based in far-off deep space. Originally published in 2003, EVE now has over 100,000 regular subscribers and at times supports in excess of 25,000 simultaneous players, all interacting in the same space on a single server cluster.

CCP's Python-based client front end provides photo-realistic rendering of complex surfaces in real-time, driving the latest graphics and hardware technology with DirectX9 to provide a realistic gaming experience even under the most stressful battle conditions.