A Brazilian is the 160 millionth registered user of avast! antivirus and has won  a sweetheart trip to Prague for two.

In fact, it is such a sweet deal, it will be Fabricia’s honeymoon and she will come with her husband. It took so long to convince her that the offer of an expenses-paid trip for two to Prague was real – for someone who had just registered a  copy of avast! Free Antivirus and to arrange the trip for her and her new husband – that AVAST has almost added another 20 million registered users in the meantime. We just hope it will be much easier to give away the next trip to Prague.

But, just the facts.

On May 27, Fabricia downloaded and registered a copy of avast! Free Antivirus for her home computer. That’s all. And she went on with her normal life with its facets of work (health sector), love (fiancée), and life together (planning a wedding). And she had absolutely no idea of the commotion that her simple registration would cause over 10,000 km away in the Czech Republic.

In Prague, Julia Szymanska, our AVAST Community Manager, had been getting ready for the registration counter to reach the 160 million mark. With around 100,000 registrations a day, these numbers change quickly. Thankfully, Fabricia had registered with a valid email address. But communication was not easy as there was no response to the first few emails.  For starters, she does not speak English and then she thought the emails were spam.

While some of us were ready to give up, our Brazilian colleague in AVAST took over the task. Marcus  Googled her email address and name to find her work address and then gave her a direct phone call. After several rounds of communication, he succeeded in convincing her that the AVAST offer was real and that she should really accept it. And when we learned that she would be soon be getting married, this put the expenses-paid trip into a new, very romantic perspective.

In two days, our newlyweds will arrive in Prague.  For the two of them, we hope this will be the sweetheart trip they  remember for the rest of their lives. And for the rest of the world, it should be a reminder that a free antivirus can be very good to its users AND please pay attention to your emails. After all, we are about ready to notify the 180 millionth user.

I’m 38 years old, lived my first 33 years in the USA, read and studied amply about US government agencies over the years (especially during my ultra-paranoid conspiracy theory phase in my early 20s), and yet, until today, I had never heard of DARPA.

According to Wikipedia, however, the agency has been around a while — longer than me, in fact:  << Its original name was simply Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), but it was renamed to “DARPA” (for Defense) in March 1972, then renamed “ARPA” again in February 1993, and then renamed “DARPA” again in March 1996. >>

It sounds like an agency with multiple personality disorder, but I guess it’s essentially a branch of the Department of Defense (DoD) that focuses on technological R&D.

Why am I telling you about it? Because I know a lot of readers of this blog are sharp-minded (maybe even genius-level) non-Luddites, who can actually understand what the guys in our Virus Lab talk about when they post here… and would jump at the chance to prove their skills  (and win some money in the process). Read more…

Launched in 1996, Download.com is the leading (and safest) download portal for software of all types. The portal has been offering our avast! Free Antivirus for 10 of those 15 years, so we would like to say CONGRATULATIONS, and we look forward to the future.

AVAST Brand Manager Miroslav Jirku says, “Download.com is definitely an important distribution channel for us, because it’s well known in the USA. avast! Free Antivirus is Download.com’s 2^nd most-downloaded software for 2011, which is really a great success for the whole avast! team.”

Indeed, in addition to being its 2nd most-downloaded software of 2011, avast! Free Antivirus is also Download.com’s 5th most-downloaded software program of all time.

Read more…

The content of VB 2011 programme provided an excellent amount of information from the security industry in the last three days. It came packed in an interesting and humorous way. Here is some more pictures from conference to present the atmosphere and we looking forward on next conference!

Greetings from Barcelona. The conference is in the middle and here are few pictures from the first day. Everyone seems to be satisfied with the conference, and especially with the free beer offered by AVAST!

For 10 years now, AVAST has been giving free antivirus protection to home computer users. What started on June 1^st 2001 as an innovative step to bring the avast! brand to users around the globe without expensive advertising has worked very well indeed. Over 130 million users are now protected by avast! Free Antivirus and while it may sound like a cliché, even the users who have the free version are very valuable to us.

For starters, it is you, the users of the free version, who give us priceless word-of-mouth advertising. The majority of new users know about AVAST only because it was recommended to them by their friends (hence, we don’t pay for any advertising). You help us to translate the software (avast! is now available in 38 languages and 11 are now being finalized). You help each other and us at the Support Forum and, last but not least, you help us to find new viruses via the CommunityIQ system. Read more…

avast! Forum member "CharleyO"

Known as “CharleyO” on the avast! Forum, Charles O. Prince is one of the 15 most-active avast! Forum members, with more than 6,500 posts since he joined in early 2004. Like his fellow forum members Bob Gostischa (“bob3160”) and Lisandro Souza (“Tech”), as well as many others, Charley helps avast! users around the world with their technical questions. In lieu of my traditional “5 Questions with [person]” interview format, I decided to let Charley paint for us a bigger picture as to how he came to be such an avid supporter of avast! over the years – followed by only 3 questions this time. I think you’ll find his personal IT history fascinating. – Jason Mashak

Read more…

Fabricia, from Brazil, was a very lucky register user. She registered her avast! software and, as the 160,000,000th registration, won a trip to Prague.   On top of it, she is going to get married soon, so AVAST Software will be a happy sponsor of her honeymoon in Prague. Typical for a Brazilian, Fabricia is sociable and friendly. So after exchanging plenty of messages and calling her (with great help from our Brazilian-Portuguese-speaking AVAST colleague, Marcus), we became friends on Facebook. (Here I should say OBREGADA to a Google Translator . So when I saw Fabricias’ post, I couldn’t resist writing about it!  We just sent the tickets we booked for Fabricia and her fiancé last week, which immediately was reflected on Facebook with a photo album “A honeymoon in Prague is confirmed” – with pictures of beautiful Prague! We are very much looking forward to meeting Fabricia and Eder in November. More than just for security, avast! Free Antivirus gives you the chance to win valuable prizes. For more info check our winners section.

To follow up on the previous post on videos, I forgot to mention one important thing: we never planned to produce ‘silent movies’. This means we were looking for somebody who could help us to record the voices.

Luckily, we didn’t have to search long. Some time back, we introduced the new Community section on our website where you could play and download theme voice notifications.  “AVAST virus database has been updated” and all the other ones. A couple of the themed voice versions (for example the “ex-president”) were recorded by our voice actor Luis Acevedo.

Here is his show reel. Play sample

Enjoy!