WordPress.Com Owner Automattic Buys Sharing Platform Cloudup

Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg’s firm confirms biggest acquisition ever, plans to offer collaborative posting

As WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg promised TechWeekEuroe readers last week, Automattic has made a big acquisition in the form of file-sharing service Cloudup.

Automattic, which owns WordPress.com, said it was acquiring a “ridiculously fast sharing platform”.

Latest addition to WordPress.com

Matt Mullenweg“Cloudup’s core services capture many things we’ve long wanted to do around improving the WordPress Media Library and we’re super excited to make these improvements a reality,” said Raanan Bar-Cohen, head of corporate development and partnerships at Automattic, in a blog post.

“Another exciting feature our new friends from Cloudup will help build is a real-time collaborative editing experience. What Google Docs has done with documents, we believe we can do with blog posts.

“We have some big ideas on what we can do in this space, and we’ll be incorporating these efforts into the WordPress.com visual editor in the coming months.”

For now,  Cloudup remains in private beta, although another  5,000 spaces have been opened up for those who want to test drive the service.

Cloudup said it had streamed over 300,000 items, totaling almost 1,500GB, to date.

“By joining forces with Automattic, we’ll become part of an amazing company with more resources, experience supporting millions of users, and wicked smart people in every role,” said company CEO Thianh Lu.

“We will be implementing some of our core technology right into the heart of WordPress.com to make sharing more seamless and beautiful for even more people every day.”

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