Since Automattic was founded in 2005, it has acquired several businesses, services, products, and people. In August, the company will be 10 years old and I thought it would be interesting to see if the acquisitions the company has made are still around. The list is organized from earliest to latest. Gravatar Gravatar stands for…
If you own or operate a business and need a Terms of Service, Privacy, or various other legal documents, check out the Legalmattic repository on Github. In 2014, Automattic open sourced all of its legal documents, including its DMCA takedown notice. If you choose an Automattic legal document as a foundation to write your own,…
This past weekend, 250 professionals gathered in Phoenix, Arizona for Pressnomics, a three-day event focused on entrepreneurship in the WordPress economy. During the last day, attendees had the opportunity to watch Pagely CEO Joshua Strebel interview Matt Mullenweg. Although the session wasn’t recorded, the audience tweeted out the highlights of the interview, and discussion continued…
A couple months ago, Automattic made headlines with its public dismissal of Janet Jackson’s spurious claims of trademark and copyright infringement. Jackson is now a fixture in the company’s Hall of Shame, along with others who have issued abusive takedown demands. Automattic considers these a threat to freedom of speech and has even taken to…
Matt Mullenweg announced today at Web Summit in Dublin that Automattic has acquired Code for the People, a UK-based WordPress development agency and longtime WordPress.com VIP partner. The acquisition adds all six members of the company, including co-founders Simon Dickson and Simon Wheatley, to the WordPress.com VIP team. “It’s a fairly natural transition for us,”…
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Andrea Middleton who manages WordCamp Central. She tells us what it means to be a “dot organizer” within Automattic and what her day to day duties are managing WordCamp Central. We discuss whether the WordCamp Guidelines allow for differentiation between WordCamps. Middleton explains the various…
In this weeks show, Marcus Couch and I are joined by the founder of BruteProtect, Sam Hotchkiss. We learn the circumstances which lead to the birth of BruteProtect and how it operates. Hotchkiss explains the details of the acquisition with Automattic and how it will be rolled into Jetpack. While some people are not happy…
The parent company of BruteProtect, Parka, LLC has been acquired by Automattic for an undisclosed amount. BruteProtect is a service providing brute force login protection for thousands of WordPress sites. The BruteProtect plugin will be phased out and rolled into Jetpack and will remain free to use. The services offered by BruteProtect pro are now…
As I was listening to an interview with Chris Lema, I was surprised to hear how Crowd Favorite has offices setup across the world. Many of the WordPress agencies I’m familiar with are 100% distributed with one physical office. This is the first time I’ve heard of a WordPress development agency with multiple offices throughout…
Earlier this year, Automattic’s Toni Schneider asked Gravatar users what platform should be first to receive the Gravatar mobile app. No details on the purpose of the Gravatar app were revealed at the time but it turns out that the team has been busy developing a photo app. While working on the Gravatar app, they…
In a crucial courtroom decision involving Google v.s Oracle, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in favor of Oracle. The main part of the appeal is whether Oracle can claim copyright on Java APIs and if Google infringed that copyright. If the ruling stands, it would create a major setback to…
WordPress currently powers 22% of all websites, up from 18% in 2013, with a CMS market share of 59.8%. The success of WordPress.com, Automattic’s flagship product, is part of the reason that number continues to rise steadily. WordPress.com makes it easy for anyone to create a WordPress site without the burden of setting up hosting…
Scroll Kit founders Cody Brown and Kate Ray announced today that they are joining the product team at WordPress.com. Automattic, having recently acquired Longreads and Cloudup, adds Scroll Kit to its collection, ostensibly in order to subsume its better features into WordPress.com. Unlike Cloudup and Longreads, which have continued on with business as usual after…
Today Automattic introduced Postbot, a new stand-alone application for scheduling image posts. The new app allows users to upload multiple images and schedule them out over several days. Postbot creates a post for each image and automatically posts them to the selected blog, saving users the trouble of manually scheduling each one. When using Postbot,…
Marcus Couch and I were joined by Eric Mann to discuss the news of the week. After the news, we discussed in-depth a few of the core proposals Mann has published on his blog. We covered the following three WordPress core proposals: Data Service Portability Offline Editor After speaking with Mann, it’s clear he puts…