| Business Wiki Company JotSpot Launches With $5.2M Series A | |||
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| JotSpot, which has developed enteprise software based on wiki
collaboration technology, launched today with $5.2 million in Series A financing. Mayfield Fund and Redpoint Ventures co-led the round that also included founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer. Proceeds will be used for product development, marketing and sales for the company that has been operating quietly for about 15 months. Chief executive Kraus and CTO Spencer are also two of the founders of the Internet search engine Excite.com. Kraus described JotSpot's product as "a Web site specifically designed to facilitate collaboration within business." Most Web sites are read-only but wikis have an edit button that enables users to read and change content which makes an interesting collaborative tool for shared Web sites, he added. JotSpot provides an enterprise version of wikis. Kraus said its application wiki has two advantages over a company such as Socialtext Inc., a provider of weblog groupware, which produces what Kraus describes as a "document wiki." "Wikis are typically only used by tech users - it's not like editing in Word," Kraus said, noting it involves a more arcane markup language. 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," Kraus added. "The problem is that wikis have no structure," he said. JotSpot solves this problem by layering on structure to pages which, in turn, enables a user to search or create tables of its data. JotSpot users can also integrate data from the Internet. Kraus said wikis usually "infect" an organization "from the bottom up," noting it is not CIOs but rather engineers who typically introduce the technology to companies. The company begins an invitation-only free beta program upon its launch. JotSpot has been in customer trials since the second quarter. Kraus said the company is still determining who is interested in the technology and gathering market data from its beta programs. But, broadly, JotSpot is targeting work groups at companies of all sizes, he said. JotSpot will offer its application wiki as a hosted service and will offer its product free for open source product use. The company has built twelve pre-packaged applications, including products for recruiting, help desks and CRM, Kraus said. As a result of the round, Geoff Yang, partner at Redpoint Ventures, and Allen Morgan, managing director at Mayfield Funds, join the four-member board. Palo Alto, Calif.-based JotSpot has about 12 employees and is hiring broadly |
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