Automattic acquires spellchecking company After the Deadline
Fairly or not, the Internet has earned a reputation as the home for typos, incorrect spelling, and bad grammar. I’ve certainly been responsible for my share of cringeworthy mistakes. Automattic, the company that created the WordPress blogging platform (which powers VentureBeat and many other sites), is taking steps to improve that with the just-announced acquisition of a spell-checking startup called After the Deadline.
After the Deadline founder Raphael Mudge writes that his goal in developing the… Continue Reading
Wordpress’s BuddyPress is the web’s social network in a box
Blogging platform company Automattic already has millions of people using WordPress, its simple and effective blogging software (we’ve been pretty happy using it so far).
Now it has opened up BuddyPress, its long-awaited social network for blogs. It’s an easy way to add social networking features like profiles, a Facebook-like Wall and more to users profiles on to Wordpress blog networks.
This way, bloggers can make a blog more social, bringing them and their readers closer together…. Continue Reading
Blog company Automattic buys Blo.gs
Automattic, the company that runs the popular Wordpress blogging software, has acquired the Blo.gs pinging and blog trackback technology from Yahoo.
Services like Blo.gs give bloggers a way to quickly “ping,” or alert search engines and RSS readers when their new content gets posted. Especially for competitive news blogs like VentureBeat, speed is a necessity, because we can sometimes break a story, but we may not be credited with it if we don’t get the word… Continue Reading
Online poll site BuzzDash shutting after failing to raise round
BuzzDash is shutting down due to lack of funding. The online polling site was one of a number of sites that let users create their own polls. We used it frequently here on VentureBeat.
In a note to users sent Friday night, BuzzDash founder and chief executive David Gerken said that BuzzDash will be “winding down in seven days.” He added, “We truly appreciate everyone’s involvement in creating a national forum where people can gauge and… Continue Reading
JS-Kit nabs SezWho as blog comment services converge
Blog commenting services have been consolidating over the past year, thinning out a once crowded market. Most recently, JS-Kit, maker of blog widgets for polls, ratings and comments, acquired competing commenting company SezWho — which itself absorbed blog semantic search firm Tejit last May. And just last fall, Wordpress parent company Automattic bought comment provider IntenseDebate. No financial terms were disclosed for any of these deals.
JS-Kit says it will keep the SezWho service live for… Continue Reading
Automattic acquires Polldaddy to blend blogs with online polls
<a href =”http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/999467/” >Is Automattic’s acquisition of PollDaddy a good move?</a> <br /> <span style=”font-size:9px;” mce_style=”font-size:9px;”> (<a href =”http://www.polldaddy.com”> surveys</a>)</span>
The folks at Automattic can’t spell. But they have figured out that reader polls are a good way to keep users engaged with a blog. And that’s why they’re acquiring PollDaddy today. Just in time for election season.
Polldaddy is a big player in the poll and survey service on the Internet. Users can create polls on… Continue Reading
Automattic buys blog comment plugin Intense Debate
We’re live at the TechStars demo day in Mountain View, Calif., where companies from the incubator are showing off what they’re up to. Just announced: Intense Debate, a blog commenting plugin system that grew out of Tech Stars, has been bought by Automattic, parent company of blog platform WordPress, for an undisclosed sum.
The Intense Debate system includes commenter profiles, threaded comments, spam control, and other features designed to make the comment sections of online articles… Continue Reading
Spurning purchase offers, Automattic raises round and partners with NYT
Automattic, the company that owns the popular Wordpress blogging software platform, has raised $29.5 million from existing investors and a new partner, the New York Times. Some companies had offered to buy it, founder Matt Mullenweg writes.
The San Francisco company started out as an open source code project at WordPress.org, which provided software that anyone could download and then host on their own server (what VentureBeat currently uses). More recently, it also began offering free… Continue Reading
Roundup: Alibaba’s ads, Flying cars don’t fly, Google’s switches, more
updated
Here’s the latest action:
1. Alibaba launches its own ad platform
2. SpiralFrog losing money rapidly
3. Viddler launches way to advertise at “tagged’ points within video
4. Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader receives mixed reviews
5. Advertising technology startup Clickable raising $3 million more
6. Hope you can afford a helicopter — Flying cars don’t work
7. Automattic’s founders, getting ready for cash out?
8. Google buying switches for network?
9. SuccessFactors has SuccessfulIPO
Alibaba launches its own ad platform — The third-biggest ad platform may soon… Continue Reading
VCs love Obama, mapping merger, Gravatar, China rage, more
Here’s the latest action:
1) VCs love on Obama
2) Frappr-Platial merge to take on Google
3) Is China is blocking US search engines? Or is it just U.S. jingoism?
4) Wordpress buys avatar company
5) Internet giants agree on copyright protection online — um, except Google
6) Data reveals iLike’s strong music momentum
VCs spend on Obama — Barack Obama is getting the most this year from the private equity crowd. He has raised $128,208 from 75 different VCs, according to PEHub…. Continue Reading
Roundup: Six Apart’s memo, VCs and sex toys, WiMax in 2008, Newser.com & more
Here’s the latest (updated) action:
Six Apart’s headaches — The blogging software market is highly competitive, so small differences in quality can make a difference in user adoption. Six Apart, a Silicon Valley start-up that offers several blogging software platforms, including Movable Type, has released a product after acknowledging internally it could make developers mad. [Six Apart’s Anil Dash has since responded in comments, saying the company took time to fix the bugs for the release. The… Continue Reading
KnowNow and WordPress partner for enterprise blogging & RSS
KnowNow, a Sunnyvale company that has made early inroads selling RSS technology to companies, has agreed to help sell and support WordPress blogging software.
The deal is significant because KnowNow has quietly been selling nicely priced software systems — both hosted and server systems — to companies that help those companies track transactions, news and other events via the RSS protocol. KnowNow has lacked its own blogging software, and this gives San Francisco’s Automattic, the company… Continue Reading
VentureBeat is back
We launched early yesterday morning, but an overwhelming spike in traffic, a subsequent server crash and no fallback combined to shut down the Web site for a whole day.
We’ve learned some lessons.
1) It is hard to launch a start-up. It is surreal to be on this side of the Internet meltdowns, something we covered smugly in our previous role of employed reporter. I recall how we at SiliconBeat wrote about blog search start-up Sphere… Continue Reading
Wireless company Trapeze raises $30M — stays on the trapeze
Trapeze Networks, the Pleasanton start-up that provides equipment to build WiFi local area networks, has raised $30 million in a fourth round of funding, apparently with the help of Juniper Networks.
This is signficant because Trapeze early last year looked like it had “fallen off the trapeze,” as Battery investor Tom Crotty put it to us.
At the time, Crotty was savoring the acquisition of Airespace, which was sold last year to Cisco for $450 million. A… Continue Reading
Roundup: 37Signals, MetroFi, CaliSolar & Duffield’s taxes…and more
37signals, the jazzy Web 2.0 company, takes funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — See the company’s announcement here about why. We last mentioned the company here. The company boasts: Since we launched Basecamp we’ve been contacted by nearly 30 different VC firms. We’ve never been interested in the typical traditional VC deal. With a few exceptions, all the VCs could offer us was cash and connections. We’re fine on both of those fronts. We don’t… Continue Reading