Google’s Acquisition Spree, Acquires JotSpot

By Srivats • November 4, 2006

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                  I was outta happenings in webworld for almost couple of weeks. Last big news was Google’s acquisition of Youtube. Now again they have done it. Google has acquired JotSpot, a Palo Alto company that makes Web-site pages called wikis, for an undisclosed amount, according to separate posts today on both companies’ blogs.As we know, Wikis are changeable Web pages whose content can easily be edited by many users, allowing people in different locations to easily collaborate on a page. The purchase is further evidence of one of the Mountain View search giant’s emerging strategies: helping people share information and media online. Earlier this month, Google bought video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion. It also launched Google Docs & Spreadsheets, an online word processing and spreadsheet service that combined internal Google technology with that acquired in the March purchase of Writely.
        “Joining Google allows us to plug into the resources that only a company of Google’s scale can offer, like a huge audience, access to world-class data centers and a team of incredibly smart people,” JotSpot co-founder and Chief Executive Joe Kraus wrote in a post on Google’s blog.
          Kraus and JotSpot Chief Technology Officer Graham Spencer, the co-founders of once high-flying Web portal Excite, created JotSpot in 2004. The company had raised $5.2 million from Redpoint Ventures and Mayfield Fund, two well-known Menlo Park venture capital firms. Its customers include eBay, Symantec and Oxford University Press.
              It has to be seen, how Google is going to integrate the profit making Jotspot, into its business model which stresses on ‘Dont be Evil’. Meanwhile, the new registrations have been put to wait and existing customers can still access their accounts.