Free and get 85 million users

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AVG is now 18 years old and is launching their ninth version of its AVG antivirus software to be available in mid-October. And it free!

Giving things away free sure will get you many friends and in this case a lot of users. Well, 85,000,000 of them.

And I love quoting numbers. It makes me seem smarter.

The new one runs 50 percent faster than its previous version. And it offers a new way to protect against identity theft, a problem that has been mushrooming in recent years.

Now the software takes about 11 mouse clicks to install, compared to 22 before. It’s the little innovations like this that have helped the company snag 40 percent of the worldwide free antivirus software market.

You may also have heard that Microsoft also wants to give free anti-virus stuffs too. They called theirs Microsoft Security Essentials. I understand it is not bad.

In the case of the new AVG:

The new suite of software has basic antivirus protection. But it also includes layers of protections such as a firewall, anti-spyware, and Link Scanner. The latter examines the search results in your Internet searches and tells you whether those links are safe to click. LinkScanner frequently updates its scans of a link; that’s important now because many sites are hijacked and what was a safe site yesterday could be a dangerous site today.

After AVG looks for known threats, it enlists help from the cloud, where it taps “behavioral” technology that figures out if a new file or link is behaving in a suspicious way. With such technology, AVG can block a new virus even if that virus isn’t in the known library of viruses.

Looks kind of impressive.