Now that is good news. JotSpot has been acquired by Google. We are using JotSpot as our corporate wiki and are pretty happy with it as it is, but things will now likely improve.
Jot is currently sending around this email, which explains a bit about the acquisition.
JotSpot is now part of Google
We’re writing to let you know that Google has acquired JotSpot. We believe this is great news for our users. More importantly, we want to reassure you that you’ll continue to have uninterrupted access to your account. Both Google and JotSpot are committed to supporting our customers, and we understand that users have invested a lot in our products. In the near-term, we’re focused on migrating JotSpot to Google’s systems and datacenters. We’ll work hard to make that move as seamless as possible so that customers won’t be inconvenienced.
Why is Google acquiring JotSpot?
Google shares JotSpot’s vision for helping people collaborate, share and work together online. JotSpot’s team and technology are a strong fit with existing Google products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Groups.
What does this mean for JotSpot customers?
We believe that joining Google will accelerate our team’s vision of offering users the best collaboration platform on the web. Google shares that vision and presents us with the world’s best environment for delivering on it. We’ll be taking advantage of Google’s world-class systems infrastructure and operations expertise to ensure that access to your JotSpot is fast and reliable. We can’t share any of our plans publicly just yet, but we can tell you that we’re incredibly excited about the possibilities. We can’t think of a better company to have been acquired by.
Will paying customers still be charged?
We will no longer be billing customers for the use of the service. Although you will still have use of the product at your current pricing plan, we won’t charge you anymore when your current billing cycle expires.
What about security and privacy?
Your data is yours — that doesn’t change at Google. We will continue to work to ensure the privacy and security of your data. Furthermore, Google is as committed to privacy and security as we are. Since the user information you provided to JotSpot will soon be transferred to Google as part of their acquisition of JotSpot, we want to provide you with the opportunity to retrieve your user information and cease usage of the JotSpot service before the transition. If you do not wish to continue using JotSpot, send an email to privacy@jot.com in the next sixty days and we will reply with instructions for retrieving your user information.
Answers to more frequently asked questions are available at http://www.jot.com/. If you have any other questions, please email support@jot.com.
In closing, we wanted to offer our sincere gratitude to you — our customers — for believing in us and helping us achieve success. We look forward to continuing that relationship at Google.
Best wishes,
The JotSpot Team
Congratulations to the team! I got my first into to JotSpot by Joe Krauss in 2004, which I first hinted at and then could post about.
Monthly Archives: October 2006
Google Acquires JotSpot
Get your Fonera NOW
I wanted to post about this yesterday but it fell through the cracks, now Martin confirms it. End of next week the Fonera will cost 29 EURs. So if you want to get your fonera for free, I suggest you go at it now. You have a few days left until you will not get it for free anymore.
There will soon be thousands of Foneras in Germany, and hundreds of thousands all over the world. It makes absolute sense to share your nocat. I am sharing it at two places already and if I knew somebody at the airport I would give them 10 and make them a Bill. Sadly I don’t. If you do, go out and get some.
You might just want to have a chat with Fon directly if you believe you can set up a few restaurants in the city center. Check out the “SuperBill Aktion” in Germany.
Everyone is a Vampire
Or no one actually. In an article on Spiegel, they give out the solution from Costas Efthimious, physics professor from the University of Central Florida. It’s actually pretty simple. Presuming the first vampire appeared 1st of January 1600 and we have a world population of 536.870.911 people (it was roughly 500 million back then), we would all be vampires now.
Why that? We already know that vampires need to bite people to get their blood and those people become vampires themselves. Easy enough. So let’s further presume that a vampire needs to bite one person per month. The first one then had a friend on 1st of February 1600. On the first of March 1600 there were already 4 vampires in the world. 29 months later (2^29) there would be no normal human beings left.
There you have it. You can sleep well. There are no vampires or they have a very low need for blood. Of course if we think that they only bite one person per 10 years, we might still have a few humans left, because due to maths, this really scales best at the end. Think what you will. 
Cyberport 24 aka Woot! Germany launches
Cyberport just announced on their blog that they have launched Cyberport.24. They got the idea from Woot! and the adapted idea is simple.
They will each week place 2 different products online for 2 days with a good reduction. Now they have a bluetooth stick for 10 EURs online and 36 pieces are left at the time of this writing. First come first served, like at Woot!. I suggest you subscribe to the rss feed of Cyberport.24, as some interesting things might come along.
I would have expected them to launch with something a little bit more exciting than a bluetooth stick though.
Barcamp Cologne
Both Timo and Nico have already posted about it. Seems like BarCamp is coming to Cologne. Welcome to BarCampCologne. It’s taking place at the QSC AG Offices (right here) which are pretty close to where I live.
The registration page is filling quickly with the candidates that you would expect. I am looking forward to a nice few days with some interesting subjects.
La Fonera now free in Germany
Starting today, people that are interested in joining the FON Movement will be able to get their own free La Fonera, without giving their credit card or paying for shipment. You can get more info directly from de.fon.com but here are the basics:
- You get La Fonera
- You pay nothing
- You hook La Fonera up to your DSL
- You descide if you want to be Linus or Bill
- You give it to a friend or neighbour when you don’t want it anymore.
Running two hotspots in Cologne I am looking forward to see more hotspots pop up on the map and really getting coverage with my Nokia 770.
Update: Martin gives a bit more info on his blog.
Project Blackbox
You want power? You get power. I posted some time ago about Google’s Shipping Container Data Center, an idea to put an entire data center into a shipping container. That seems to have been done, as of today. Check out Sun’s Project Blackbox. It’s a shipping container that you can, sometime maybe, buy from Sun, including 250 Fire T1000 Servers.
You configure it, get it shipped and dropped of somewhere, then just add power and internet and you are done. Sadly, it’s a prototype. So it might just be a marketing stunt by some photoshop artists inside Sun.
Social Networking in Germany
This is actually just about the two players that I recently had talks with but none the less it is interesting to see the moves these two are doing.
First up is OpenBC, or rather Xing, which invited some bloggers to communicate their new brand. The meeting took place the monday after the news of Xing broke. I actually have to confirm that they clearly didn’t want that to happen. First up I got a call from Daniela the day the news broke saying that this wasn’t planned and they actually had a very busy weekend because of it. Inviting bloggers to communicate the new brand the first time actually wouldn’t have made sense if the leak was intentional. It seems that one thing they overlooked is that one organisation where they registered the brand allowed for searching for company name to find the registration and not for the registered name only.
Some nice other things appeared in the talk. First up, the name really came from Bill Lao’s mother and it will allow them, as I said previously, to be a lot more international. Reflecting their international focus, they are now 50 people from 17 nations and have very active users. Their Mission is to cross barriers for a sustainable world, which will be interesting to see how they transfer this to the brand. Their focus will remain on business people though. The thing with the new brand is that they will more easily also connect to professors and the like who do not see themselves as business, though they are in the OpenBC sense. You could actually also say professionals, which was actually their word.
We then got a presentation of the new design and I have to say that I like it. Navigation will get simpler, and it will be more focussed. They are also going all CSS but are still using tables for emm… tables, something we (mostly) stopped doing at Ormigo early on. The the talk followed on some future things which will turn out to be interesting. Microformats like hcard, hresume and hevent or even hlisting are one, an upcoming API is another. I am actually really looking forward to the API as it looks very promising, coming somewhere H1 2007. This also means that there might be somebody that gives me a Sync client for OpenBC, which would be wonderful. For things like the API they are actually recruiting developers internally. I am already looking forward to the new platform and what will develop from them becoming more open.
The other invitation I got was to see the new Neu.de from NU2M. This is actually a dating community but only at the time. It ran or runs .NET and is 100% rewritten after NU2M now owns all of Neu.de, which they bought recently (they only had a share previously). They have some very good Web 2.0ish features in the Platform and I am happy to hear that they are putting an end to release cycles, moving along with continuous releases starting first with the basic platform. They believe in the Me Brand and that I will stop wanting to be anonymous on the internet and you need a place to get a human face. As such, they will become a platform to allow me to do that. That also means that they will as a second step move towards social networking as a second step after or as a first before the dating. Currently people having found their date are actually done but the new idea will try to keep them on the platform to socialize in a secured community.
One big part of what they do is leveraging what they already have with Mabber. Neu.de integrates messaging via the Mabber functionality in that I can message any use that is online now and talk to them via an integrated web based IM tool, a very cool feature. The main problem I see is moving people from Dating in red, to Social Networking in green. The other way around might be easy, but it’s a good idea that needs to be tried. We Germans want to remain in control of our data and that’s why MySpace isn’t our first platform really.
The will also, with the social networking, add more community features that will be free in terms of autocompleted tags for community search. In that sense I can be part of any community that I can word very easily. On top of that they are adding an authentication method in that they will be sure that I am who I say I am, or reasonably sure at least. This is good as it they can have faksters but without the abusive faksters.
A cool bit is that they are currently offering people a 1 EUR service to send them their pictures to scan them in. This shows that you need to cater to the users you have, and they know that, and lots of their users just don’t have digital photos of themselves yet. They can also do lots of integration with other stuff they have like mp3.de or location based services through their experience with mobile mabber.
They also bought in calendar data which they will allow people to comment on and easily meet up at concerts and the like. That shows that they are seeing all those things, like upcoming, as a feature, they right mindset in my mind.
Both face different challenges, OpenBC transfering the brand all in all, and Neu.de to see if they can convert people to social networking without destroying their business model. They both have big goals and at the moment they are not going into the same space but we will see how this one plays out. OpenBC has the mind share, Neu.de the marketing power. But more about that marketing bit later.
Google AdSense Down
Google Down, originally uploaded by owt.I just went to adsense, or tried to rather, and look what I found. Google is down! Well that’s a first. The homepage is not by the way and ads are still showing.
Second Life goes offline for a bit
Second Life has gone offline. I just read about it on Blog Age and it sure sounds interesting and shows how interesting virtual worlds can be. To put the problem back in our world, somebody found a bug that allows other people to steal (or rather get control over other persons items) and they are now working on fixing that.
The official Second Life Blog has some more infos for those wanting to see the story develop from inside. There are already well over 1000 comments from the close to 1 million players. I hope they have a good backend when 1 million people start downloading the new client.
