As Matt mentioned in the September Wrap-Up, we are heading to Québec City with the rest of the Automattic crew for our biannual meetup to work on some top-secret projects.

Here at Automattic we are spread across the world, and are in a sense a distributed company.  For instance, Beau is located in San Fransisco, CA; Jon is in Boulder, CO; I’m in Chicago, IL; and Isaac is in Veddige, Sweden.  So we relish the opportunity to get together to kick-it, toss around some ideas, and collaborate with the rest of the Automattic team.

Past meetups have yielded some super-cool features and enhancements for IntenseDebate like our PollDaddy Polls plugin, Gravatar integration, localization, backend integration, and some top-secret projects that are still underway.  We’ve also contributed to WordPress.com features like Reply-By-Email which was a product of our time with the Automattic crew last October in Breckenridge, Colorado (picture below).

The Automattic family has grown since our last meetup so we’re excited to have the opportunity to meet and trade ideas with our newest colleagues. With that in mind, while support will still be readily available and answered daily, please allow for some extra-time in the upcoming week as we might take slightly longer to respond. We greatly appreciate your patience.

You can expect great things to come!

Posted by Michael Koenig in News

We’re constantly searching the globe for talented developers to join our crew here at IntenseDebate. Drum roll please…

Please meet the newest rockstar to join our crew here at IntenseDebate, Mehmet Alkanlar. New to Boulder, Colorado, Mehmet joins us from Izmir, Turkey and has some heavy PHP/MySQL experience under his belt.

Mehmet holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Montana State University. But there’s more to Mehmet than meets the eye. He’s a skydiver, windsurfer, and classical guitarist – that’s a pretty well rounded developer right there.

He’s been here a little over a week and his abilities are already blowing our minds. Currently he’s tackling some back-end projects but you can expect to see him flex his dev muscles with some shiny new features soon enough. Please drop Mehmet a line in the comment section below, and be sure to check out his profile to learn more about him. Oh and swing by his twitter profile – he’s brand new and trying to get the hang of it!

Stoked to have you on the team Mehmet!

Posted by Michael Koenig in News

We’re proud to announce the newest addition to the IntenseDebate crew, Austin Hallock. Austin joins us as a self-taught programmer from Arvada, Colorado. At just 16 years-of-age, Austin has already been involved in several web ventures. So far we’ve all been blown away by his hard work and motivation, and somehow he’s actually ahead of schedule! In fact, some upcoming features are the product of Austin’s coding muscle.

Yeah, he’s a bit of a rockstar prodigy. He just might be the LeBron James of developers…

Glad to have you Austin! Keep on kickin’ ass and takin’ names.

Posted by Michael Koenig in News

Today we’re happy to announce the newest member to the Intense Debate team, Tom Keller.  Tom joins us as our new CEO and we look forward to working with him.   Here’s a brief bio from the about us page.

Tom has more than 20 years’ experience in finance and high tech. Prior to joining IntenseDebate, Tom served as CEO at ClickCaster, where he helped reposition the company and guide it to profitability. Previously, Tom founded and was President and CEO of Net Infrastructure Corporation for 6 years. Tom holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science degree from the University of Washington, and a Master of Science degree in Engineering-Economic Systems from Stanford University.

Glad to have you as part of the team Tom.  We’ve got a lot of exciting things to announce in the coming weeks, so be sure to subscribe to this blog if you haven’t already.

Posted by Jon Fox in News

Today we are announcing that Josh is leaving Intense Debate for personal reasons.  We all feel this is what’s best for both Intense Debate and Josh. We certainly wish him well in his future pursuits.

Losing a team member in a small startup like ours is obviously never easy, but we remain committed to providing the best tool for online conversation to all of our users.

We’ve got some really exciting stuff in the pipeline, so keep checking back for the latest news.

Posted by Jon Fox in News