Joe Kraus, one of the co-founders of Excite, has unveiled today his new company: JotSpot at the Web 2.0 conference. Joe had joined the blogosphere a couple of months ago, creating a blog focusing on entrepreneurship (and cookies).
He is up there on the podium, claiming that he has not slept for two days… That's what happens when you officially launch your company, and your product (in beta). The company also announced a $5.2M funding by Tier 1 VCs: Redpoint and Mayfield. Geoff Yang (who backed Joe at Excite) and Allen Morgan (also an investor in Tribe.net and Pluck - which announced today the close of its $8.5M series B) have joined the board.
Wikis have been around for a while, and have gained increased visibility in the enterprise, noticeably through the efforts of Ross Mayfield, the CEO of SocialText (someone at the Web 2.0 conference came across him and said "Oh, the wiki man"). According to Joe, wikis have been growing in popularity over the past year (25.000 downloads in May 04, counting the 8 most popular wikis - 6 times more than a year ago).
As to the JotSpot wiki, here are some of the functionality I noted:
- Wysiwyg editing (given how painful the wiki syntax sometimes is, it is a very good thing)
- Looks Javascript-based, with UI elements similar to Gmail (including the shortcuts)
- More functional file import than other wikis I have used
- Allows to add structure to documents through a form-based template, after the fact. But there is no automatic data extraction to fill in the template, you have to re-edit the document and enter data in the template (the system could take a guess and pre-fill the template).
- Very easy to include web components (rss integration, google search,…) to a wiki page.
From the labs, Joe shows and integration of the wiki with SF.com (from the labs), with an idea of federating data across SF.com and the wiki - extending SF's data model (i.e it saves data in SF when possible, and then saves the additional information in the wiki - powerful functionality but a potential migration nightmare).
The key differentiation point of JotSpot seems to be the ease of integration with enterprise apps and information, hence the "Application Wiki" tagline that Joe mentioned.
More from CBS MarketWatch (sub req'd) and the press release from the company.
Update:
. Azeem points to TiddlyWiki, an interesting client side Wiki. Christopher Allen actually had a great post about it last week.
. Ludovic sent me a note related to XWiki, a wiki used by the CEOBloggers club. Ludovic mentions that the wysiwyg functionality of JotSpot seems based on HTMLArea, an open source project.
. Ross Mayfield also informed me that SocialText now offers wysiwyg editing, easy web service integration and a fotowiki functionality. Good stuff...
Take a look at TiddlyWiki.com for a client side Wiki. Quite an interesting idea...
Posted by: Azeem | October 06, 2004 at 01:36 PM
Hi,
If you like the notion of "Application Wiki", then check out XWiki (http://www.xwiki.org) and the sister hosting service XWiki.com (http://www.xwiki.com).
It allows to do many things listed here.. but even more.. There is a programming language inside the wiki pages and an embedded database allowing to create classes and objects and attach them to document.. It is then possibly to query the database and show the results right in the pages..
A simple demo is the wiki of the CEO bloggers club.. http://ceobloggers.xwiki.com. The members, photo album and meetings are made using these classes..
Posted by: Ludovic Dubost | October 06, 2004 at 03:41 PM
By the way, the WYSIWYG editor of JotSpot is HTMLArea, an open source project:
http://www.dynarch.com/projects/htmlarea/
The same one is used in XWiki..
Posted by: Ludovic Dubost | October 06, 2004 at 03:42 PM