JotSpot has promoted itself as more of an enterprise Wiki, because it provided more and richer types of collaborations compared to generic Wikis, which are essentially HTML pages.
Traditional Wikis looked like WordStar 1983, said Joe Krauss, CEO and cofounder.
It offered a free Wiki service that supported up to five users and 10 pages of content, and a paid service that drew 2000 companies, comprising roughly 30,000 seats. It also offered APIs so system integrators could customize the Wikis.
Last summer it released a second version of its Wiki tools that was designed to provide more of a Microsoft Office-like richer WYSIWYG experience. In addition to the word-processed documents, JotSpot 2.0 provided calendaring, spreadsheets, and images. But it lacked the kind of metadata facility that could have added a valuable content management function that would have made enterprise Wikis even richer.
But it was enough for Google, which has of late been adding other assets, like Writely, to build its own enterprise desktop.
For the founders, the Google acquisition is essentially like coming full circle. They were the principals behind the Excite search engine of Internet 1.0 during the 1990s. Retiring as the bubble burst, they came back to found JotSpot in 2003. The firm, which numbered 27 staff, raised $4.5 million in funding during its 3-years in business.
With the deal closed, the modest sized staff is expected to stay on. Presumably, Google will fold JotSpot into its growing enterprise desktop portfolio, for which it would form a logical extension. But with the ink on the deal still drying, Google has not disclosed plans on what it will do with its latest addition.
