With support from Microsoft, Automattic built and released a free, open source WordPress.com app for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.
Excerpted from:
Automattic Releases Open Source WordPress.com App for Windows 8
Automattic, the company behind blogging platform WordPress, announced Tuesday that it has acquired After the Deadline, a service that finds spelling and grammar errors in blog posts. The deal’s terms were not disclosed.
After the Deadline’s spelling-, grammar-, and style-checking tools are now available to 7.5 million WordPress blogs. It’s also available as a downloadable plug-in for WordPress users.
Looking ahead, Automattic plans to make After the Deadline open-source. It hopes the community will play a part in improving it. After the Deadline’s founder Raphael Mudge, will stay on at Automattic to deliver After the Deadline to non-English-speaking bloggers.
After the Deadline was first discovered by the Automattic team when WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg saw a comment on Hackernews from After the Deadline’s founder discussing how his tool found errors in a New York Times article. He was intrigued and contacted the tool’s founder. Just a few months later, After the Deadline is now a part of WordPress.
I’ve had the opportunity to use After the Deadline on a few occasions. (You can too by inputting content into its demonstration module.) It’s one of the most capable error-correction tools I’ve ever used.
After the Deadline, available now to WordPress users, is free to use.
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Automattic picks up After the Deadline
The company behind the WordPress blogging platform has just announced their acquisition of PollDaddy.
That’s right, Automattic and the Web-based polling and survey company are now intertwined. Based out of Sligo, Ireland, PollDaddy offers free polls with the option to run more detailed and advanced surveys at an annual rate.
Credit:
Automattic Asks: Who’s Your PollDaddy Now?
The Web-based polling and survey company PollDaddy has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind the Wordpress platform and the Wordpress.com blog hosting service.
PollDaddy offers free polls (my most recent one is on this post: Five old-fashioned Web concepts that need to die). The option to run more detailed surveys costs either $200 or $899 a year, depending on the volume of replies signed up for.
PollDaddy is based in Sligo, Ireland. CEO David Lenehan told me the company will be staying there and that his office becomes, “Automattic’s first office anywhere in the world.” Lenehan is “extremely happy” with the deal, terms of which he did not disclose. He said that PollDaddy was “profitable and growing at a nice rate” prior to the acquisition.
Product changes that have already been implemented include tighter integration into Wordpress.com hosted blogs and a transition to Automattic’s data centers. In a blog post about the acquisition, Lenehan wrote, “Over the coming weeks and months this will mean our site will be a lot more stable, polls will load faster and everything should run just the way you want it to.”
The company will continue to stay “100% focused on building PollDaddy support into as many platforms as possible, so you will see our support for MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, etc. continue to improve and grow,” Lenehan also wrote.
Polldaddy has already been integrated into Wordpress.com's authoring system.
In a barter arrangement with CNET, PollDaddy ran the voting system for the last Webware 100 awards.
See also: Matt Mullenweg’s blog: PollDaddy Goes Automattic
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Automattic acquires PollDaddy
Automattic, parent company of blogging platform WordPress, has acquired IntenseDebate, the free blog comment enhancement tool. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
The service launched a little more than a year ago with several innovative features that effectively take over a blog’s commenting system and add things like reputation, ranking, and a centralized area where blog administrators can manage comments across several sites at once.
Automattic and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg says two of the main reasons for the pickup are IntenseDebate’s e-mail replies and rating system which will likely make their way as the default offerings on WordPress.com and WordPress.org products in the near future.
For the time being, IntenseDebate has closed its doors to new users. In a post about the acquisition co-founder Jon Fox says it will be reopened to all as soon as it can prepare for a higher level of scaling. How big you ask? Like all of WordPress.org installs and WordPress.com, 4 million-plus users big.
The good news in all of this is that, according to Fox, IntenseDebate will remain a cross-platform product. From its very beginnings it has been open to other blogging tools like Blogger and MovableType. If anything, the closer integration with upcoming versions of WordPress should help accelerate development.
Originally posted here:
Automattic acquires IntenseDebate for better blog comments
