Six Apart acquires and shuts down Pownce

Blogging company Six Apart has acquired micro-blogging startup Pownce for undisclosed financial terms. It looks like one of those acquisitions where the buyer was more interested in the people than the product — the Pownce service will shut down in two weeks.

Yesterday Leah Culver (co-founder) posted on the official Pownce blog: “We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart, the company behind such great blogging software as Movable Type, TypePad and Vox.

We’ll be closing down the main Pownce website two weeks from today, December 15th.”

Mena Grabowski Trott, born Mena Grabowski on September 16, 1977 (age 31), is a co-founder of Six Apart, creator of Movable Type and TypePad. The company name originates from the fact that Trott and co-founder/husband Benjamin Trott were born six days apart.

Trott is president of Six Apart. She helps lead management and business efforts, and makes the company products aesthetically pleasing and functionally intuitive. She made her first efforts in weblogging at dollarshort.org in 2001.

Movable Type was originally developed by Mena Trott and Benjamin Trott during a period of unemployment in late 2001 for Mena’s personal blogging use.

Trott was named one of the People of the Year by PC Magazine in 2004. That same year, she was named a member of the “TR 100,” (now known as the TR35), an annual award given to leading technology advocates by Technology Review magazine.