Automattic acquires PollDaddy
Web-based polling and survey company PollDaddy has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind the Wordpress platform and the Wordpress.com blog hosting service.
PollDaddy offers free polls. (My most recent one is on this post: Five old-fashioned Web concepts that need to die.) The option to run more detailed surveys costs either $200 or $899 a year, depending on the volume of replies you've signed up for.
PollDaddy is based in Sligo, Ireland. CEO David Lenehan told me the company will be staying there and that his office becomes, "Automattic's first office anywhere in the world." Lenehan is "extremely happy" with the deal, terms of which he did not disclose. He said that PollDaddy was "profitable and growing at a nice rate" prior to the acquisition.
Product changes that have already been implemented include tighter integration into Wordpress.com hosted blogs and a transition to Automattic's data centers. In a blog post about the acquisition, Lenehan wrote, "Over the coming weeks and months this will mean our site will be a lot more stable, polls will load faster, and everything should run just the way you want it to."
The company will continue to stay "100 percent focused on building PollDaddy support into as many platforms as possible, so you will see our support for MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, etc. continue to improve and grow," Lenehan also wrote.
Polldaddy has already been integrated into Wordpress.com's authoring system.
In a barter arrangement with CNET, PollDaddy ran the voting system for the last Webware 100 awards.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
