Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot, is a happy little goblin today:
OK, I can finally blurt it out: JotSpot is now part of Google, and I couldn't be more excited.
As we built the business over the past three years Google consistently attracted our attention. We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent 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. 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.
This is a bigger deal from a business user and enterprise standpoint than for the individual user, but those lines are getting blurrier all the time.
While JotSpot's current pre-built application portfolio (calendaring, spreadsheets, text processing) may look redundant for Google, it actually expands Google Apps for Your Domain, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets by adding custom application development on a wiki framework—ideal when virtual teams working on projects together need something that the pre-built Google suite doesn't quite deliver.
It also allows JotSpot to go places it otherwise couldn't, thanks to Google's ad-driven revenue model. JotSpot will now be free.
TechCrunch's take on the deal adds the following forward-looking question about Google's rush to fill out their team productivity and collaboration services suite:
If Jotspot can be integrated as smoothly as so many other Google web applications have been, it will go a long ways towards strengthening Google for the upcoming web collaboration wars. How much longer until a web conferencing company is acquired?
This is yet another deal where Yahoo! was rumored to be a suitor, but Google wound up getting the girl.
Tags: wiki, web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, JotSpot, Google, collaboration