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.

eBay, arguably the original Web 2.0 company, is sure latching onto the newfangled 2.0 stuff. Today, it announced eBay Wiki, with service hosted by JotSpot.

eBay Dives into Web 2.0

Ah well. Our own JotSpot installations just dropped dead, so is ebaywiki.com and jot.com. I presume they just folded under the load, which should not happen. We will see when they are back up.

Congratulations to the JotSpot team though!

Update: Back up already. After a few minutes. Good luck to all of us for the rest of the day.

Technorati Tags: eBay, ebaywiki, jotspot, slashdotted

Evan posted about running your company on web apps and I do agree with him. There is a lot of great stuff out there at the moment. JotSpot is simply great and due to the internal applications and together with FogBugz, I’d say that you have a wonderful system together there alone. FogBugz just kicks some major but, and Jot has so many useful applications that you’ll have basic applications settled, including recruiting, crm, contacts, tasks, … not to mention the Wiki itself. And if you want more powerful CRM systems, try out SugarCRM, which is even free if you maintain it yourself and don’t need an Outlook connector and such.

Then you could, if you are not competing, use GMail for your basic eMail system and Google Groups for your mailing lists (stuff like press for example). Of course you track what is being said about you via Technorati.com or PubSub and get your blog hosted on TypePad or even start a blog community for your users at 21Publish (who are now allowing for free setups if you run their ads).

Then you still need phones, but for example Net Cologne here in Germany offers a hosted PBX, where you just call to get more numbers. You could also just got with a good connection plus Skype and Mobile Phones. Hell, I have a US number now on Skype and Voicemail. I even bought a new Plantronics Headset to get good quality out of the damn thing.

Looking at the list one might start to wonder why found a company anyway, when all is practically taken care of. Give or take a few years, with PayPal and others making payment a charm, even cheaper airline tickets, better freelancer markets and a few more tricks, and we might handle a life without big companies … okok, might be hard to run McDo or BMW like this, but hey, it’s an idea for a small subset of the market.