Google 2nd Generation Wiki on the way - Jotspot gobbled up

Based in Palo Alto CA, JotSpot, is a private company started in 2004 by Excite.com co-founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, the company had launched the first of 2G wiki applications allowing anyone to create, publish, and share collaborative and personalized wiki applications. Google Inc. bought them today for an undisclosed sum.

JotSpot's wiki allows you to create rich web-based spreadsheets, calendars, documents and photo galleries. Easy as a word processor — no need to know HTML / XML . JotSpot has 30,000 paid users and some 2,000 businesses are using JotSpot to manage projects, build an intranet, share files and stay in sync with colleagues and customers inluding Oxford University Press and E-Bay.

The 27 employees will move 6 miles down the road to Google's Mountain View headquarters.

Shares of Google rose $1.96 to $478.53 on NASDAQ

Founder Joe Kraus Upon graduated from Stanford University in 1993, he joined with five engineering friends to found the highly successful Internet company, Excite, Inc. After leaving Excite@Home in 2000, Joe was a co-founder of Digitalconsumer.org, a non-profit grassroots consumer organization with more than 50,000 members dedicated to protecting consumers fair-use rights to digital media. Joe, along with other JotSpot cofounder GrahamSpencer, continues to work on these important issues. In addition to his non-profit focus, he has also spent many years as an angel investor, working with numerous early-stage technology companies. Here is a downloadable 32 minute Podtech interview with Joe Kraus by Robert Scoble.

Read Joe's thoughts on start ups in June this year - Joe is a smart guy - read it carefully

Briefly ..

Excite.com took $3,000,000 to get from idea to launch. JotSpot took $100,000.

Why on earth is there a 30X difference? There’s probably a lot of reasons, but here are my top four. I’m interested in hearing about what other people think are factors as well.

Hardware is 100X cheaper

Infrastructure software is free

Access to Global Labor Markets

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) changes everything

He also writes ... "We spent a crap-load of money. There’s an old adage in television advertising (actually apocryphal remark of Lord Leverhulme about selling Sunlight Soap about 1900) “I know half my money is wasted. Trouble is, I don’t know what half”. That was us.

They could have spent a few shillings on some decent typography when they designed the logo.

If you want the smutty, dirty lowdown on how online porn funds Wikipedia read Lord Patel here "100 things you didn't know about Wikipedia".