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…
Automattic announced its acquisition of Longreads today. Since 2009, the Longreads service has helped people find and share the best fiction and nonfiction longform content on the web, curated by its team of editors and the #longreads hashtag. Longreads defines longform content as anything over 1,500 words, the type of articles that are most often…
Without much in the way of advertising, Underscores has become a popular choice for WordPress theme developers. To learn more about it, I asked Automattic employee, Konstantin Obenland, @obenland on Twitter, to explain what the theme is, how it got its name, and how people can contribute to the project. Why was Underscores created and…
Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder and CEO of Automattic, was recently featured on the Hired Podcast, a show that focuses on exciting things in the world of work life and company culture. Cameron Moll, founder of Authentic Jobs, hosts this short 27 minute interview, which many of you may enjoy. As Mullenweg tells the story of…
After celebrating his 30th birthday this weekend, Matt Mullenweg announced that he has accepted a new role as CEO of Automattic. Toni Schneider joined Automattic as CEO eight years ago in January 2006 and has helped to expand Automattic’s reach to what he says is close to a billion people each month. But Schneider isn’t…
Cloudup is a file sharing service that was acquired by Automattic on September 25th, 2013. Their goal is to make file sharing “simple and beautiful.” Not having any experience with Dropbox, Cloudup was amazingly easy to set up and start using. In the past, I used FTP to upload images I wanted to share to…
In 2008, Automattic created a WordPress theme entitled Prologue. A year after its launch, Automattic released P2 to take the place of Prologue. P2 was a revolutionary theme as it enabled communication to happen in near real-time and arranged comments so that they were equally as important as blog posts. From 2009 to 2013, P2…
Jeffrey Zeldman founder of Happy Cog and co-founder of A List Apart has joined Automattic’s advisory board. The news was announced by Zeldman in a tweet on November 22nd. In that same tweet, Zeldman mentioned that his personal site Zeldman.com is now using WordPress. In a quote from Matt Mullenweg published on Post Status, Zeldman’s…
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is reporting that Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com has joined two lawsuits in federal court under Section 512(f) of the DMCA. Section 512(f) is the provision that allows users to hold people accountable when they make false infringement accusations.