JotSpot, the first application wiki company, today announced the official formation of the company and the completion of an initial round of venture capital funding of $5.2 million from Mayfield and Redpoint Ventures. The company, which has been operating quietly for more than a year, is co-founded by Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, two of the original founders of the popular Internet search engine Excite.com. Building upon the growing popularity of wiki technology and recognizing the emerging market need for simpler Web-based applications, JotSpot extends wiki technology into the realm of workgroup applications: making web-based applications simpler to build, deploy and evolve.

The company also today announced and began an invitation-only free beta program. JotSpot will offer its application wiki as a hosted service. As supporters of the open source community, the company will offer its product free for open source project use. Workgroups can start using the service in three ways: begin immediately using the full-featured commercial wiki, install pre-packaged wiki-applications from JotSpot’s application gallery or customize an individual wiki-application for a specific business need. Just as Microsoft Excel™ gave workgroups the capability to build financial applications, previously only the realm of programmers, JotSpot intends to do the same thing for workgroups with lightweight web applications.

A concept originated in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, a wiki is a type of Web site that many people can revise, update and append with new information. To date, wikis have been text-centered, focused on helping multiple people collaborate on writing and evolving documents. These document wikis have grown quickly in popularity and spread organically inside companies, largely in the hands of technical users.

Using its own wiki technology as a platform, JotSpot brings the best of the document wiki concepts to Web application development. “Simple web applications are not simple to build,” said Joe Kraus, co-founder and chief executive officer, JotSpot. “They should be. We’ve taken the advantages of traditional document-based wikis — designing as you go and the wiki conforming to a user’s unique work style rather than the other way around — and used them as a foundation for building Web applications. We make wikis scriptable. When a workgroup can customize their wiki by building simple applications and thereby, customize how they work, the true potential of a wiki is unleashed.”

THE INTERSECTION OF TWO TRENDS CREATES A MARKET OPPORTUNITY
The company brings together two trends. The first trend is the growing popularity of document-wikis among technical users. The second trend is the move away from desktop applications and toward browser-based applications. The company is defining a new market segment at the intersection of these two trends by taking the fundamental strengths of traditional wikis and using them to create a simple modular platform for building browser-based applications.
The JotSpot application wiki is designed as the ideal platform for lightweight workgroup collaborative applications that can be customized for very specific business needs and uses. The ultimate benefit of the JotSpot application wiki is that the design of a web application can constantly evolve based on user behavior and learning. Multiple people can collaborate on the design of a web application and the structure of the application can emerge as people continue to use it.

For example, in just a few hours, a company could build a custom web-based recruiting application that matches that company’s exact recruiting process. Then, users can easily evolve the application as additional requirements are understood. Or, in that same amount of time, the company could create a lightweight trouble ticketing application that is customized to the work-style of that company.

JotSpot uniquely offers advanced email integration, a breakthrough feature for the category. Every page in a JotSpot wiki contains an Inbox. Users can simply CC: a wiki page and the system will capture that email, index its content, and properly handle and index any attachments. This allows users to easily create a central repository – searchable, easily archived and a shared part of any discussion taking place in email. This increases efficiency and decreases excessive email traffic. Users can also email any wiki page to a group of people or person to easily notify them of new information in the wiki.

A second unique feature to the JotSpot is its external data integration, which lets JotSpot applications easily integrate with content from across the web. For example, a contact management application could easily integrate Yahoo! News (custom to each contact) over RSS, Hoovers data (on the contact’s employer) over the Web and SalesForce.com information via SOAP. This feature allows JotSpot users to build composite applications quickly, seamlessly combining data from the web with internal data in the wiki.

Continued Kraus, “Wikis started out as a simple way to share, organize and search unstructured information – all the emails and documents that fly around an organization, land in people’s inboxes and get stored away, never to be found again.” JotSpot not only handles this task but then enables people to create semi-structured applications on top of this data. “We make wikis programmable, allowing you to layer structured information on top of all the unstructured data.”

UNLEASHING THE POTENTIAL OF WIKIS FOR THE MAINSTREAM
The JotSpot application wiki offers the full feature set of a standard document wiki: collaborative editing, version control, attachment capability and full-text search. In addition, JotSpot extends document-wiki functions by offering: Microsoft-Word ™ style WYSIWYG editing, email integration (every page is an Inbox) and a database backend.
Mainstream workgroup users who want to build and customize applications for their specific uses can do so with minimal programming knowledge. While many more sophisticated tools are available to the technical programmer, the basic programmer can create customized applications quickly by taking advantage of JotSpot’s modular platform. JotSpot will also offer a gallery of basic applications, which can be easily installed and modified. Examples include lightweight task management, trouble ticketing, CRM and recruiting applications.

“These are accomplished entrepreneurs who have proven that they know how to build a company successfully,” said Geoff Yang, partner, Redpoint Ventures. “We also backed this team because they are defining a new segment that can fundamentally change how groups work.”

FUNDING AND MANAGEMENT
JotSpot management will work closely with blue chip venture capital firms Mayfield and Redpoint Ventures, both with funding and also partnering to build an extended team. To date, JotSpot has raised more than five million dollars in its Series A round. Additional investors include founders Kraus and Spencer.
Founders Kraus and Spencer will lead the company in key roles; Kraus will direct the company in the role of CEO while Spencer will lead the technical development of the product, as the company’s CTO. Joining the founders is a team of technically savvy and seasoned engineers with a broad range of backgrounds.

“For several reasons, the traditional enterprise application market is distressed,” said Allen Morgan, managing director, Mayfield. “ Enterprise applications are difficult to install, hard to modify, rigid in their workflow and corpulent with features no one uses. Despite this, the enterprise applications market is huge. JotSpot takes dead aim at this problem, and this huge market, by enabling others to build powerful, yet lightweight and flexible, enterprise applications that workers in enterprises will actually use to increase their productivity.”

AVAILABILITY
The company today began an invitation-only beta program. The company has been in customer trials that span a number of different business needs and unique environments throughout Q2 and Q3, 2004. More information can be found at www.jotspot.com.

ABOUT JOTSPOT
JotSpot, headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., is the first application wiki company. Founded and led by Excite.com co-founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, the company has a mission of making Web applications simple to build through the power of wiki. The JotSpot technology turns today’s document wiki into an application development platform and expands the boundaries of what a wiki can do for enterprise and workgroup users. For more information, please visit www.jotspot.com

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