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To: ~digs who wrote (167)	10/6/2004 6:24:00 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 1275

Excite Founders Form JotSpot To Promote Wikis Technology By DON CLARK and VAUHINI VARA Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL October 6, 2004; Page B12 Two founders of Excite Inc., a star during the early years of the Internet, have joined a race to turn a grass-roots technology called wikis into a mainstream business tool. Wikis are Web pages that users can write on as well as read. The concept, developed in the mid-1990s by programmer Ward Cunningham, has evolved as a way for work groups to create documents that can be updated continuously. The popularity of wikis attracted Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer. The two men in 1993 helped to start Excite -- which was sold in 1999 to @Home Corp. -- and have now formed JotSpot, a start-up that hopes to make wikis easier to set up and to program. That way, companies can more quickly create simple Web-based software to handle chores such as tracking job applicants or customer calls, Mr. Kraus said. At the moment, many companies find it too difficult or expensive to tailor business applications themselves. In many cases, they resort to managing common tasks using a combination of Microsoft Corp.'s Excel spreadsheets and e-mail, Mr. Kraus noted. That poses problems, since it can be hard to keep track of information that can be stored in many mailboxes and isn't automatically updated. JotSpot, a closely held company in Silicon Valley, has raised $5.2 million from venture-capital firms Mayfield and Redpoint Ventures. It plans to offer easier ways to edit wiki pages. It also will offer templates for simple business applications as well as easier ways to send e-mail to and from wikis. In addition, instead of making customers run wiki software on their own servers, it plans to offer wikis as a service managed on its own computers, though it hasn't announced pricing plans. But competition will be abundant. Another start-up in Palo Alto, Socialtext, says it already has more than 50 corporate customers. The company charges $30 a month per user for use of a version of its product that is hosted on its own computers. Ross Mayfield, Socialtext's chief executive officer, said his company also helps its customers to make simple applications. JotSpot may be attempting more complex wiki-based applications, he said, but that approach runs the risk of creating restrictions on how data are entered. "Wikis are dead simple -- that's why people use them," Mr. Mayfield said. But Peter O'Kelly, an analyst with market researcher Burton Group, says JotSpot made a good decision in adding database technology to help users structure and sort through information. Existing wikis can fill up with information that is hard to manage, he said. Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com1 and Vauhini Vara at vauhini.vara@wsj.com2 URL for this article: online.wsj.com Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) mailto:don.clark@wsj.com (2) mailto:vauhini.vara@wsj.com