For reasons that will be obvious after you read it, we won’t be including this link/summary on our Written about us webpage, but it’s funny enough to at least share it on our blog:

January 21, 2011– Infowars.com: Bilderberg Owned Publication The Economist: Yes, Powerful “Globocrat” Elites Are Running Things, It’s Not A Conspiracy

“Anna Nimus” (anonymous) names avast! antivirus a co-conspirator toward global domination – because we have more than one ‘a’ in our name.

(Select [Ctrl] + [F], then type “avast” – it will take you to the comment.)

Didn’t “Anna Nimus” read my recent post “Half the world is enough“?  BTW, this article was posted on 01/21/2011… Look at all those ONEs and TWOs… what does all this mean?!  ;-)

My boss, Marketing Director Milos Korenko, made a blog post here a few days ago in which he mentioned/linked to an honor received by a book of poetry I wrote. He also said that my job at AVAST is pretty much “crafting IT-terms into words and texts that normal people would understand.” I would argue that my job is not quite so simple as that but I’ll explain Milos’s point.

I’ve been a regular computer user since buying my first PC, an HP desktop, in 1997. It ran Windows 95, and I think it had McAffee antivirus (the engine for which was provided by avast!). I sacrificed sleep on many nights, to try to learn a new operating system that was NOTHING like the Commodore 64 (complete with cassette-tape drive) that I had taken my only real computer classes on 10 years prior. In 2002, I bought a Gateway desktop with Windows XP… that’s right, from Windows 95 to Windows XP.

I’m probably an average computer user. I use my laptop at home for social (and other) networking, Skype calls, research, and word processing, primarily. My job all day is on a desktop PC, from which I handle various writing assignments, web research, project tasks, and seemingly endless forms of communication.

Aside from what I use PCs for daily, however, I really don’t know much about them – which is, in many ways, good for my work. Read more…

I have to admit, this is the first marketing job I have ever had where – surprisingly – I don’t have any advertising budget.     Shocking to some (especially to those who try to sell us some air space) but no AVAST does not pay for any advertising.    Sadly for me that means there are no creative briefs, no castings, no posh creative agencies and their production meetings, no trips abroad for location selections.  On the upside for me,  I will not lose my hair or its color trying to plan marketing campaigns in the 200 or so countries and territories where we have our users. Read more…

avast! evangelists have started speaking directly with community groups – in addition to their traditional activities at the User Forum – about security risks on the internet.

The first evangelist to take the avast! message outside of the Forum is Bob Gostischa, better known by his username of “bob3160”.

Bob spoke to 28 community groups in Arizona, with a total audience of over 1,200 people during December, giving examples of infected websites and describing current security issues facing web surfers.

“I am often clarifying what they have heard elsewhere,” says Bob. “It’s been a truly enjoyable to meet so many friendly and interested people – in person – and share with them why avast! Free Antivirus is such a vital part of their computers’ overall protection.”

The User Forum (forum.avast.com) is an integral part of the avast! community, a  place where people gather online to discuss antivirus software, ask about malware, and help out newcomers. Read more…

The quiet launch of avast! 5.1 has some people guessing: Is this a concept vehicle, a new model, or just a facelift?

In the automotive sector, a concept car is the designer’s visualization of how the car’s identity and key features will develop, a new model has brand-new exterior metal, and a facelift just has a different plastic bumper slapped on the same old sheet metal.

So if the 5.1 was a car and I was a ‘gearhead’, this is what the report would be:  Read more…

As of January 19, we have lived 25 years with  malware. The first ever virus for the personal computer was written by two Pakistan brothers, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi. ©Brain was the name of this virus, it infected the MS-DOS FAT boot sector and it was harmless. This MBR rootkit just promoted their company with following text:

Welcome to the Dungeon © 1986 Basit * Amjad (pvt) Ltd. BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES 730 NIZAM BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN LAHORE-PAKISTAN PHONE: 430791,443248,280530. Beware of this VIRUS.... Contact us for vaccination...

Read more…

AVAST Software founders (Prague, 2010)

A few months ago we posted this

article on AVAST Software founders Pavel Baudiš and Eduard Kučera

to our Written About Us page (a list of summaries and links to recent press coverage), but I wanted to bring attention to it here, as well.

Containing a brief history of what drove the two men to create software amid major political turmoil and economic transitions (i.e., regained Czechoslovak independence), the article highlights some of the problems they faced as a fledgling company in a new global environment. As well, it points to the difficult choices they made in terms of an innovative business model, which helped them to attain roles as world-class leaders in the antivirus industry.

For those who may wonder what AVAST Software’s plans are for 2011 (and beyond)… pay special attention to the last paragraph.

I promised to follow on the most-download-software-statistics post from last week and shed some light on the real number… the number of avast! users.   But before that, let me get back to the history a little because what seems as the most obvious thing now – didn’t look quite so obvious 9 years ago.

It was only in January 2002 when AVAST introduced for the first time its free antivirus and allowed home, non-commercial users to use it for free.    During the whole first month following the introduction only  93 (!) users downloaded, installed and registered the free version.

Some say, getting the “first million” is the most difficult part.  Read more…

This didn’t come through the official media monitoring butit’s definitely something to share

The whole avast! team is not that big and has today – I guess – about 140 heads.  (Note:  we try to keep 1 million registered users per each employee as a good efficiency metric)   The other good things is… the team is a mixture of many nationalities (we don’t have Human Resource Department so I can’t ask anybody how many we really have but it got to be close to 20) and also number of different and colorful personal backgrounds.  Anything from doctors, movie special effects managers to mayonnaise marketeers   (yes, once upon a time which seems like a different life now, I was marketing mayonnaise)

But we didn’t have a poet.  Read more…