Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

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.

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.

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 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.

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.