Google Acquires JotSpot, the Wiki Company

Google tries to add more value to their Google Office. This is one of the reasons why they bought JotSpot, a startup focused on creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets, calendars, photos, videos and other files.


"Three years ago my friend Graham Spencer and I set out to start a new company. We'd both recently left Excite, which we co-founded, and we had spent a few years starting a nonprofit together. (...) We realized we needed a tool to help us organize our thoughts or we'd quickly become overwhelmed. So Graham set up a wiki. I was hooked because it immediately changed the way we worked together. Everything was kept in one place, not locked in email threads or on different computers. We could both make changes to the same document, without having to know HTML (well, without me having to know HTML). After twenty minutes of using a wiki, I was convinced that they were like the Internet in 1993 -- useful, but trapped in the land of the nerds (which both Graham and I proudly inhabit). So we set out to start JotSpot as a way to bring the power of wikis to a much broader audience," writes Joe Kraus from JotSpot.

As he explained two years ago, "wikis are typically only used by tech users - it's not like editing in Word. (...) JotSpot makes wikis easier to use by providing Word-style graphic editing as well as e-mail integration for applications such as recruiting. Every page in our wiki has an inbox. The problem is that wikis have no structure. JotSpot solves this problem by layering on structure to pages which, in turn, enables a user to search or create tables of its data."

If you want to read more about JotSpot, ReadWriteWeb has some news and screenshots, while nPost.com has an interesting interview with Joe Kraus.

JotSpot has closed new registrations until it moves to Google's platform.