Automattic has teamed up with Federated Media to – finally – allow WordPress.com bloggers to make money from online advertising. The project is called WordAds and if you’re on WordPress.com you can express your interest for the program here.
From the WordPress.com blog, including a fair bit of snark directed at Google: → Read More
WP Engine, a powerful hosted WordPress platform for existing WordPress.org users, has raised $1.2 million in new funding led by Silverton Partners with angels Eric Ries, Loic Le Meur, Dharmesh Shah, Jeremy Benken, Bill Boebel, Rob Walling participating. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, also made a strategic investment in WP Engine.
WP Engine, which launched in July of 2010, provides a enterprise-level hosting service for WordPress.org users who are tired of managing servers and doing IT work themselves. WP Engine makes sure blogs have super fast page load times, and scale when hit with a ton of traffic. → Read More
A few weeks ago, we heard that the San Francisco Port Authority had red-tagged Pier 38 — putting up warnings that the space was unsafe. This is a big deal because Pier 38 is something of a tech hub. It’s home to tenants including Dogpatch Labs, Polaris Ventures, Automattic, True Ventures, 99 Designs, EGG HAUS, and more.
While Robert Scoble grabbed some pictures showing just how serious these notices were — it’s never good to see a big red sign with the word “UNSAFE” on the door to your business — Polaris’ Ryan Spoon downplayed the warnings. Here’s what he said to us at the time: → Read More
In a blog post on the WordPress.com blog, Automattic‘s Justin Shreve this morning acknowledged his employer’s aspirations to turn WordPress.com into more of a platform than a mere Web-based blogging software service.
The company has added support for authentication protocol OAuth 2 to WordPress.com and is debuting a brand new developer portal. → Read More
The latest stable version of WordPress, 3.1, was first released on 23 February 2011.
Now, less than 5 months later, the blogging software has been downloaded over 15 million times according to a tweet posted mere minutes ago.
Just yesterday, WordPress parent company Automattic published a blog post, announcing that the next version, WordPress 3.2, will be released ‘very soon’. → Read More
Automattic is announcing a new feature for the 17 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com—premium themes. The blogging platform giant says that commercial themes have been “thriving” for self-hosted WordPress sites, and it made sense to expand this offering to blogs hosted on WordPress.com.
Today, WordPress.com is making two premium themes available to users: Headlines by WooThemes, and Shelf, by the Theme Foundry. Headlines’ magazine-like theme includes a Featured Post slideshow, multiple menus, and 15 different color schemes. Headlines and Shelf will be available for one-time prices of $45 and $68, respectively. Additional premium themes will be rolled out later in the year. → Read More
Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg and CEO Toni Schneider were interviewed by our own Alexia Tsotsis at Le Web 10 today. Our live notes (paraphrased):
How big is the company right now?
We’re about 74 people. In terms of revenues to sustain our growth, I’d say we make a little under $1 million a month from all our services combined. → Read More
A couple weeks ago, we noted that Automattic was testing out a new Top Author stat area on the Site Stats page found on WordPress.com blogs. Today, they’ve rolled out the feature with a couple little bonuses.
First of all, the widget itself has been prettied-up quite a bit from the one we shared. You’ll now see author icons next to the author names. More importantly, you’ll see a plus sign, which, when clicked, presents a drop down that shows you exactly what stories by that author are brining in traffic on any given day. WordPress.com also removed the number of posts area, after that caused some confusion. “the top spot is not about who wrote the most posts, it’s about which author wrote the posts that got the most visits,” they note. → Read More
When Automattic launched VaultPress, a subscription-based protection, security and backup service for WordPress blogs and sites in March, the company was flooded with requests for the new service. Still in private beta, VaultPress now has a long wait list of users wanting to use the service. But today, WP Engine, a powerful hosted WordPress platform for WordPress.com users who need more flexibility or existing WordPress.org users, is giving you a ‘golden ticket’ to VaultPress.
WP Engine, which launched in July, provides a enterprise-level hosting service for WordPress.com blogs or for WordPress.org users who are tired of managing servers and doing IT work themselves. WP Engine makes sure blogs have super fast page load times, and scale when hit with a ton of traffic. → Read More
Joe Wilcox at BetaNews has posted a must-read article in the wake of the announcement – made at TechCrunch Disrupt SF – that the Redmond software giant would be transitioning all its Windows Live Spaces users to Automattic‘s WordPress.com platform.
You may recall Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live, stating that there were roughly 30 million active Windows Live Spaces accounts.
Wilcox, however, has managed to obtain internal e-mail messages exchanged between (yet unnamed) Microsoft employees that suggest far lower numbers. → Read More
Back in 2006, we covered the launch of Windows Live Spaces, a blogging service for Windows Live users. Today the service is headed in a new direction: Microsoft has teamed with Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, to transition its users over to the popular hosted blogging platform. The news was just announced at TechCrunch Disrupt by Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live and Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic.
Microsoft says that it decided that instead of building its own competing blogging service, it should go with WordPress’s fleshed-out feature set, which has 26 million users and powers over 8.5% of sites across the web. Users will be migrated through a process that preserves all of their content, and will automatically redirect visitors who head to their existing Microsoft Live Spaces sites. → Read More
“It’s not often you see a for-profit company donate one of their most valuable core assets and give up control,” Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg writes today in a post announcing that the WordPress trademark has been transfered from his company to the WordPress Foundation. “This is a really big deal,” he continues.
What this means is that the key ingredient behind Automattic is now in the hands of the organization in charge of “promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity.” So why do this? Mullenweg says it has been his goal since the beginning to blend a non-profit business, a for-profit one, and not-just-for-profit one under one banner. Now that he feels each of those aspects is stable enough, he wants that main banner, WordPress, to be “protected” as a “beacon for open source freedom.” → Read More
Over the past few months, Automattic’s popular blog platform WordPress.com has taken an in-depth look at their blogging ecosystem, and realized that one of the major pain points for the 12.1 million users who self-host their WordPress blogs is security and restoration. WordPress.com backs up all of the blogs that it hosts, but those users who self-host their WordPress-powered blogs need to download outside plugins, such as this one, or use backup services like Mozy or Backupify to protect their data and content. Today Automattic is changing that with the launch of its own blog protection and restoration service for self-hosted blogs, called VaultPress.
Currently in private beta, VaultPress is a plugin users can download that acts as a backup service for your blog. Not only will the software help keep your blog up and running, but it will also soon monitor your site to alert you if their is suspicious activity or a hacking. Alternatively, VaultPress will eventually update your blog with security hot-fixes automatically. VaultPress will be a paid service and will probably be in the ballpark range of $15 to 20 per month, according to Automattic VP of User Growth Paul Kim. At first VaultPress will be extended on an invitation only basis and will eventually be open to the public in the near future. → Read More
This morning, a blogging platform and a microblogging platform have become more symbiotic. WordPress has enabled posting and reading the blogs the platform powers via the Twitter API.
This means any Twitter app that supports a custom API URL can be used to either post updates to your WordPress.com blog, or to read updates from blogs you’ve subscribed to. Tweetie 2, an iPhone and desktop Twitter client, will be one of the first third party apps to implement this. → Read More
You would think that, almost exactly 4 years after opening up to the public, WordPress.com would have a way for people to subscribe to blogs by e-mail, right? You’d be wrong, at least until today.
While there has always been the possibility to subscribe to blogs by e-mail using FeedBurner or other RSS facilitators, WordPress.com’s parent company Automattic has now added an email subscription feature to the popular free blogging service. → Read More
Automattic has acquired spelling plug-in After The Deadline, which adds spelling, style, and grammar checking to web applications through a plug-in. WordPress and Automattic co-founder Matt Mullenweg announced the acquisition in a blog post.
After The Deadline is an impressive (Mullenweg was “blown away” by its functionality) spellchecker that lets you customize how the tool analyzes content. Mullenweg says that the new plug-in is already enabled for WordPress blogs. You can go to the proofreading settings in your profile, and then enable After The Deadline by clicking on the icon in the Visual Editor toolbar that has ABC and a green checkmark on it. → Read More
We’re still at The Next Web Conference 2009 here in Amsterdam, and I just ran into Matt Mullenweg from Automattic / WordPress and immediately cornered him, put him against a brick wall outside and got him to answer some questions about the company and WordPress.
The takeaways:
- BuddyPress, which is supposed to transform an installation of WordPress MU into some sort of a white-label social networking platform, is going to be launched ‘relatively shortly’. Mullenweg calls it “Facebook-in-a-box”.
(more after the jump) → Read More
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has acquired Irish startup Polldaddy for an undisclosed sum. The purchase gives WordPress an infusion of polling technology and seems to be justified simply on the basis that bloggers love polls (we use PollDaddy here at TechCrunch for many of our posts). → Read More
Today at the TechStars demo day, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, announced that it has acquired enhanced commenting system IntenseDebate for an undisclosed amount.
WordPress has long been in need of an upgraded commenting system, which has led to a number of replacement and augmented systems in the last year, including Disqus and JS-KIT. WordPress CEO Toni Schneider says that better commenting has been on the blogging platform’s roadmap for some time, and that IntenseDebate’s team and technology made the company a good target for acquisition.
WordPress 2.7 will include some of IntenseDebate’s features by default, including threaded commenting. The service will also introduce a plugin that tightly integrates the rest of IntenseDebate’s other features, like aggregated commenting across multiple blogs.
In a blog post announcing the deal, IntenseDebate says that it will now be re-entering private beta, though the service’s current users will still be able to use it. IntenseDebate will stay a separate service that will be tightly integrated in WordPress, but will also be available for other platforms (Akismet’s spam filtering has been used in a similar manner).
IntenseDebate originally launched to the public last October, sporting features including OpenID support, user profiles, and the ability to track a user’s comments across multiple blogs. Since launch the site has seen impressive growth, reporting at least a 25% increase in users each month. → Read More
