Automattic, the company behind publishing platform WordPress, has sold $50 million in a secondary offering led by investment management firm Tiger Global. The sale will allow some early investors and employees to get cash in exchange for their shares, while adding another stakeholder in the company. → Read More
Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, just announced that it is rolling out a vertical for portfolio sites. This, the company says, is meant to allow photographers, videographers, illustrators, painters, designers and others who want to showcase their creations on WordPress.com. → Read More
Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress content management and blogging platform, just launched Jetpack 2.0, which brings a number of WordPress.com features to self-hosted WordPress installs. The promise of Jetpack has always been to bring more of the features from the hosted WordPress.com platform to those who want full control over their servers and this new version finally includes… → Read More
One of the staples of tech news sites is the liveblog — not everyone loves them, but for folks who really care about the latest iPhone launch, a liveblog allows you to follow along with every piece of news as it’s revealed on-stage. Here are TechCrunch, we use CoverItLive (which was acquired last year by Demand Media), which is okay. Still, as with any blogging product, there’s always some… → Read More
Today Acquia, the company co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert to commercialize the open source content management system, acquired Mollom, a spam filtering service also co-founded by Buytaert. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Acquia CEO Tom Erickson tells me the Mollom service will continue to be available for non-Drupal users and pricing will remain unchanged. → Read More
Automattic is announcing a new feature for large-scale sites hosted in WordPress.com VIP SaaS program (TechCrunch is a VIP publisher)—Featured Partners for third-party integrations. Basically, the program allows companies that have integrated their services with the WordPress platform to promote and seamlessly enable their tools for large-scale VIP sites, which account for one billion page views… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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. → 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… → 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… → Read More
Today at WordCamp, a User and Developer 1-day conference for the WordPress blogging platform, Founder Matt Mullenweg announced impressive growth figures and reaffirmed Automattic‘s focus on fixing some of WordPress’s biggest weaknesses. The theme for the “State of the Word”, Mullenweg’s yearly keynote, was “Strong,” and growth from both WordPress.com and… → Read More
Sweden’s most popular cultural export The Pirate Bay has entered the blog hosting game with new free-speech focused blogging service Baywords. The service was launched by The Pirate Bay after a friend of one of The Pirate Bay’s founders had his blog deleted by Automattic (WordPress.com) for linking to copyrighted material. The Pirate Bay team explains: We’re proud to present a new… → Read More
http://s.wordpress.org/resources/2.5/dashboard-and-images.swf WordPress 2.5 has been released with a major overhaul to the interface and a range of new features. The biggest change is in the appearance of the administration backend, which is described as being a “Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard.” The WordPress dashboard is now widget friendly, and users can include items such… → Read More
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