Corporate Development Progress

Long before I joined Six Apart, I chose Movable Type for my first weblog VentureBlog. It was an easy decision at the time, Movable Type had (and still has) the best API support, a robust plug-in architecture and widespread community of supporters and developers. The network effect of platform software development had taken hold, and I wanted to be a part of it. Since that time, Six Apart has continued to invest in extensibility, with its leadership in developing and supporting Atom and recent expansion of the plug-in architecture in MT 3.0.

As Six Apart's Executive Vice President in charge of Corporate Development, I'm now responsible for building out a strong set of relationships with the many other great companies and individuals helping to grow personal publishing. We take the "publishing platform" sobriquet seriously and my group might be better termed platform development. With the recent addition of Ian Kennedy, our Director of Sales and Partner Development, and Zornitza Stefanova-Mirrashidi, our Director of Product Partnerships, we're developing relationships throughout the industry to offer a better suite of features on each of our products.

In the past month, we have announced partnerships with Nokia and NewsGator to help expand the ways to publish content on your weblog and have launched the Six Apart Professional Network to provide a forum for everyone from developers to template builders to resellers to keep track of the latest developments with our company and products. There's much more cooking in the corporate and product development labs and we will be announcing a number of fun feature additions to our applications in partnership over the next few months.