If Jotspot can be integrated as smoothly as so many other Google web applications have been, it will go a long ways towards strengthening Google for the upcoming web collaboration wars. Google probably paid a substantial amount of cash for Jotspot. Details haven’t been disclosed but Jotspot is a strong company, the deal has officially closed and Google said in its last earnings call that YouTube’s all stock acquisition was unusual. Jotspot has often been discussed as one of the most successful and established enterprise 2.0 companies and I imagine the selling price was a good one for the small startup. Joe Krause frequently points out that it cost only $100,000 to get Jotspot to market. Jotspot raised one round of funding in 2004 for $5.2 million from Redpoint Ventures and Mayfield Funds. It is the first service only available as part of Google Apps (including the free version), although I had some difficulty accessing it. Excite was once considered a darling of the early web but was first acquired for less than $10 million. Three weeks ago I speculated that JotSpot, the user-friendly wiki swallowed by Google a year and a half ago would soon come out of hibernation, and Voila here it is, rebranded as Google Sites. As of today all existing customers are no longer being charged and new account registration is closed while Jotspot is integrated with the rest of Google’s services.įounders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer are also founders of early web portal Excite, now an IAC property. An intro page and screencast about Jotspot is still online but may not be for much longer. acquired JotSpot Inc., business users and commercial developers of this hosted wiki service have given mixed accounts of life as Google customers. The Palo Alto company reports having more than 2000 customers who subscribe to services costing $5 and $200 per month. The service immediately stopped taking new users, although existing users were supported. In fact, far more than a wiki, I’m going to guess that when Google reopens Jotspot to new users it will be as a wiki based project management service. Google acquired hosted wiki service Jotspot in October 2006. Google may push Jotspot primarily as a project management application, one of the most important missing pieces of the company’s office platform. The acquisition may have been largely motivated by the desire to bring on board an agile team able to quickly ramp up lightweight hosted business applications for collaboration. Other than a wiki, most of Jotspot’s plug and play applications are things that Google already has its own versions of. See all our previous coverage of Jotspot here. We also reported on rumors that Yahoo! was going to acquire the company in May. A business oriented service that plugs a long list of different applications like calendars and photo sharing into a wiki framework, we called Jotspot “the best business-facing hosted wiki available” when we reviewed its newest iteration this summer. Google’s office strategy just got a whole lot richer with the announced acquisition of the wiki based company Jotspot.
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