Maybe you noticed that we have launched an avast! manufacturer’s forum on CNET.com. Please note that it is not intended to replace our long-standing avast! Forum (forum.avast.com), which will continue to be our main forum. Nonetheless, there is a huge community around CNET.com/download.com, of which many within the community are already avast! users. We are doing our best to be closer to our community and to help in the several main places they go for help. CNET members can find the CNET avast forum at http://forums.cnet.com/avast-forum

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.

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The first company I worked at was called “CPC”.  Our product portfolio was excellent and the CPC acronym had some historical meaning but we all knew the real meaning was “Charts Producing Company”.  We were making presentations and preparing for presentations all the time.  As I said, the company portfolio was excellent so I didn’t really mind.  Plus it was the first job.  And, I can also say that I have learned something useful there too:  If you present to any audience, it greatly helps if the audience is not sleeping.  I know this is not a profound bit of wisdom, but it really works!

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Last Monday, the TV signal coming going into our TV disappeared. “No signal” was the error message displayed quite prominently on the TV screen. Well, since there is no Ice Hockey World Championships at the moment, I thought that fixing the antenna was not an issue of vital importance – a decision that my family disagreed with. So to keep the domestic peace, I called the service, they came the next day, fixed it in about 30 minutes, and all was fine until yesterday.  That is when the invoice for the service arrived.  Note, I don’t mind the cost of fixing the antenna, but I DO mind a lot the cost the repair service charged for COMING to our house. The distance is only 17 km (10 miles) but they charged 50% more than a taxi would! And, taxis in Prague are darn expensive. Which brings me to the benefits of free delivery. Read more…

For those interested in all things Android, I have some exciting news. AVAST Software has acquired ITAgents, the Austrian developer of the Theft Aware mobile phone theft protection and recovery system.

The acquisition strengthens AVAST’s technology base and gives us a hands-on security app designed for today’s Android-powered smartphones. Read more…

That’s right, we now have our very own video animator in the marketing team. We will be able to produce in-house videos and share them with you. I guess we will cover various subjects from showing and explaining how a particular program features work to addressing unique events in the life of our company or anything else worth of sharing. Read more…

At AVAST, we not only provide you with free protection, we also reward you for registering it! No, no, we’re not crazy. 

You help us immensely by recommending avast! Because of that, we don’t need to advertise, and so we want to reward you even more – e.g., Internet Security licenses, t-shirts, iPods, or a trip to Prague. (see the Winners Section at: http://www.avast.com/community )

And as we informed you several weeks ago, we celebrated our 160,000,000^th registration of avast! Free Antivirus.  The lucky person who won is Fabricia from Brazil. When she received an email to her native Brazil that she had won an all-inclusive trip to Prague for herself and a friend, she was of course skeptical, as junk mail scams with surprising  winner announcements are so common these days. But since she had just registered her avast! Free Antivirus she  was curious and asked her brother for his opinion. After a few phone calls and finding the announcement as well on avast.com, she knew it was legitimate.

Best of all, selecting the friend to accompany her was easy, as Fabricia had recently become engaged! So Fabricia’s trip to Prague – from being our 160 millionth user registration – will now also be her honeymoon.

We at AVAST are proud to be a part of it.

We are happy to announce that our Facebook fan page for avast! antivirus has reached a whopping 300,000 fans!

avast! antivirus's facebook community increase - Aug2010 to Aug2011

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This week we released program update version 6.0.1203 for avast! antivirus. Among several great improvements, two new languages were added:

• Serbian
• Thai

This means that avast! antivirus is now available in 38 official languages, listed here in alphabetical order:

• Arabic
• Belarusian
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Estonian Read more…