On September 22, 2010 Six Apart merged with VideoEgg to form SAY Media. On January 21, 2011 SAY Media announced that they would be selling the Six Apart and Movable Type brands to the Japanese tech company, Infocom. While this was the start of something big in Japan, this marked the death of Movable Type as a viable blog or CMS option in the United States.
Six Apart, now headquartered in Tokyo after the sale to Infocom, began a massive push to market in the Japanese commercial sector. In fact, over 50,000 commercial sites are powered by MT in Japan at the time of this writing. This birthed an entirely new market of MT support vendors, developers, and web hosts based around Movable Type in Japan. As an example, one of the presenters at the conference, Genova, which specializes in dentist websites, created, manages, and hosts over 11,000 Movable Type sites.
After a two year hiatus, Movable Type is ready to begin its attempt at a revival in the US following their success in Japan. On September 26th, 2012 they released MT5.2, the first notable update since MT5. They are also working on translating over 100 modern Japanese plugins into English for use in the United States. During the conference they unveiled and launched 40 of these new plugins to the US market in an effort to show that they’re serious about making progress. In attendance was the CEO of Six Apart, Nobuhiro Seki, as well as a Six Apart team consisting of their corporate product officer, marketing manager, lead engineer, CTO, and US VP of sales. They were all happy to discuss their business plans and were eager to get feedback and suggestions pertaining to the US market and Movable Type. […]
ITworld, Matthew Mombrea: “Is a Movable Type rebirth possible in the United States?”
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