AboutUs, the wiki for anything that has its own website, has snapped up a tiny startup called Jyte, the company announced in a blog post moments ago.
The terms weren’t disclosed, but you don’t need to consult any wikis to realize this is likely a very small deal.
AboutUs is just getting started, having raised a relatively small amount of venture capital (most recently $2.5 million from Voyager Capital) over the past few years. → Read More
Portland-based AboutUs has secured a $2.5 million round of financing from Voyager Capital with the VC firm’s managing director Erik Benson joining its board, reports TechFlash. The company operates a wiki for information primarily about small businesses, organizations, and ‘anything that has a website’. Yes, that includes TechCrunch.
This is different from our own wiki Crunchbase, which featured detailed profiles of companies, products and people even if they don’t have their own websites.
The wiki service attracts a very decent 7 million unique visitors per month to its network of over 12 million pages, and has plans of turning it from a mere resource of information to a full-fledged collaborative work space. In that regard, it’s different from Wikipedia, although both wikis use MediaWiki to power the network. → Read More
Portland, Oregon based AboutUs announced this week that it has closed a Series A round of funding and raised $1 million. The site is a wiki directory of web sites, mostly populated automatically but with a healthy amount of traffic and a growing number of edits being made daily. If you look up your website on AboutUs, you’ll probably find an entry there. I expect most people who aren’t wiki lovers to think this is a strange business and to some degree I think it is too. It’s also very interesting and has some good people behind it. Sixteen investors total participated in the round, with Capybara Ventures and Northwest Technology Venture providing institutional backing. AboutUs founder Ray King was co-founder and CEO of SnapNames. The Board of Advisors for AboutUs includes wiki forefather Ward Cunningham, Stephen Babson of Endeavour Capital and Keith Teare of Edgeio. The AboutUs site went live in August and has seen healthy traffic growth. The site’s traffic after only a few months is one of its primary selling points. AboutUs is built on MediaWiki, the same platform that Wikipedia runs on. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world to look at, but it’s functional. There are entries for about 3 million websites in the wiki. The vast majority are populated from Whois records, with related links and a Google Map added for each page. The 5 person company personally checks all edits each night, now between one and two thousand on average. (Founder Ray King says that adding the words “can I really change this?” is the most common edit people make to the site.) There isn’t a neutral point of view requirement, but review type text is encouraged to be placed in a special section for reviews. There is something that bothers me about having 3 million pages about websites, populated automatically and by any random editor who stops by, titled “AboutUs.” The phrase implies an autobiographical text. (It’s also probably very good for SEO.) The AboutUs page on TechCrunch wasn’t written by anyone associated with TechCrunch and there’s something about the name AboutUs that makes me uncomfortable about that. I could certainly go in and change the entry, but it feels more like something I’m obligated to do unless I ignore it. The company has partnerships with a number of domain registrars in the works to put links to each site’s AboutUs → Read More
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