Congrats to Jotspot guys
From Wall Sreet Journal
Google Inc., expanding its efforts at providing software that helps users create and post their own materials on the Internet, has acquired a California startup that develops online collaboration tools known as wikis.
The announcement came Tuesday through separate postings at Google's and JotSpot Inc.'s Web journals. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
JotSpot Chief Executive Joe Kraus wrote that he had been following Google's recent acquisitions and product launches and quickly concluded that "Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online. Then when we had conversations with people at Google we found ourselves completing each other's sentences."
Wiki tools, popularized by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, let users collaborate to create, modify and delete information.
In July, JotSpot released a new version that aims to make shared pages similar to spreadsheets, photo albums and other software people already use. In the past, Wiki tools have generally mimicked basic Web pages or word-processing documents -- photographs, for instance, might appear as a list of attachments, with no thumbnails previewing the image before downloading.
Google's acquisition of JotSpot, which has closed, comes as the Internet search leader prepares to purchase the online video-sharing site YouTube Inc. for $1.65 billion in stock.
Earlier in the year, Google said it bought Upstartle, the maker of the online word processing program Writely. Google has since packaged Writely with an online spreadsheet it developed. The free tools could help groups simultaneously work on documents and provide alternatives to Microsoft Corp.'s dominant business-software applications.
Mr. Kraus said the latest deal lets JotSpot tap into Google's resources, including a large user base and durable data centers. As JotSpot, based on Palo Alto, Calif., makes the transition to Google's systems, new registrations have been suspended.
JotSpot has both free and paid versions. The free, JotSpot-hosted service restricts the number of pages and the size of the collaborating group
