Central Desktop offers a web-based SaaS collaboration platform that allows business teams of all sizes to work virtually and seamlessly online. Central Desktop is pitched as providing “the richest set-of-tools available for business users with ease-of-use at a price-point, leveling the playing field for small and mid-size companies wishing to do business with enterprise partners and customers.”

The company has over 125,000 users and business teams currently using its tools. Central Desktop said it would use the funding to accelerate R&D, marketing and sales efforts into the SMB market.

Competitors include 37signals, JotSpot, Microsoft, WebEx, Daikana and Huddle.

Google Sites looks absolutely nothing like Jotspot, other than the fact that both are hosted wikis. All of the structured data templates launched by Jotspot in July 2006 have been stripped out. Users now have a choice between just five basic templates – a standard wiki, a dashboard where google gadgets can be embedded, a blog-like template for announcements, a file cabinet for file uploads, and a page for lists of items. Instead of creating structured templates, users will now simply embed spreadsheets, presentations and word documents from Google Docs, as well as Google Calendars, YouTube Videos and Picasa Albums.

Like Google Docs, Google Sites wikis can be made private, shared with others, or made public. Users can select from a variety of templates, but cannot yet customize the look and feel of the site. Somewhere down the road, Google says, they’ll release an API for the new service as well. Editing is done with a rich text editor that allows for basic formatting.

Google Sites is a free product, with limitations on support and storage (10 GB). Users can upgrade their Google Apps account to a standard edition, also free, and map their own domains to the site. A premier edition is also available for $50/user/year that includes a service level agreement, support and more admin capabilities.

All wiki pages have RSS feeds associated with them to allow users to track any changes.

Existing Jotspot users will continue to be supported on the old platform for the near future, and they will also be given instructions for porting their Jotspot wikis to Google sites.

In an interview today, Google’s Management Director of Enterprise Matthew Glotzbach called the combined products under Google Apps a “Microsoft Sharepoint killer” because it’s allowing businesses to collaborate without all that expensive Microsoft software. It may not be a Sharepoint killer yet, but Google Apps constitutes 2-3% of Google’s total revenues. Some point soon, its going to start hurting Microsoft.

Sample screenshots:

Google Operating System noted that the Jotspot discussion board and help desk have moved over to Google. More telling, Google Blogoscoped discovered that “jotspot” is now a Google Apps service code name. Attempts to log in to the service are shown a page with a (somewhat fuzzy) Google Wiki logo.

Google previously announced that Jotspot would be integrated into Google Apps and part of the suite of online office applications Google is developing or acquiring.

We now have two fairly high profile Google product launches to anticipate in the near future. Google announced in April that an online presentation application would be launching soon as well.

While the email (copied below) doesn’t say that JotSpot will be relaunching to new customers, it doesn’t make much sense for JotSpot to be upgrading existing customers while they are also in the middle of integrating the software into Google’s overall platform. So, perhaps, JotSpot will be open to all again in the next week or so. Or not.

Happy new year! This note is to let you know that all JotSpot wikis
will be upgraded to version 2.9 in the next week. Updates will happen
automatically and no further action is necessary.

Version 2.9 adds several exciting features including support for
Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. In addition, 2.9 fixes some general
RSS issues and offers RSS feeds for specific applications. Complete
2.9 release notes can be found here:
http://r.vresp.com/?JotSpot/043512d593/816625/812ace81ad/c97cd5e

If you have any questions or if we can provide more information,
please email jotspotsupport@google.com

Regards,
The Google Team

WikiMatrix has over 100 wikis to compare. The wiki designers maintain the information on their listing because, as WikiMatrix founder Andreas Gohr puts it, “nobody knows a product better than its creator.”

WikiMatrix was launched about a year ago and Gohr says that it is popular enough within the wiki developer community that wiki owners are proactive about getting their sites listed. But he says that users’ knowledge of wikis usually doesn’t go much further than Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia was written to power an encyclopedia,” Gohr said via IM on Friday. “Not everyone needs an encyclopedia. Others might have the need to have the wiki integrated into enterprise structures. There are various different use cases for wikis and various different engines and each does things a little bit different. If you decide to replace the Intranet of a 5,000+ employee company with a wiki you may need to compare different choices. That’s what WikiMatrix is for.”

Users can also create their ideal wiki on the site and then see which wiki comes the closest to matching their needs. Gohr’s 10-person company also launched ForumMatrix.org last year as a spin-off, which is basically the same site but for forum software, although Gohr admits it isn’t as popular as WikiMatrix yet.

Update (Nov 30): JotSpot Founder Joe Kraus reponds in the comments.

Sometimes it isn’t until a blog post gets deleted for one reason or another that it grabs people’s attention. That happened today when a relatively new blogger named “Kevin” deleted a blog post titled “The JotSpot Google Merger,” where he complained that JotSpot left them stranded as a partner after Google acquired the company last month.

Blog posts are cached upon posting by a number of search engines, so the text of the original post is easily recovered:

The JotSpot Google Merger

So I’m finally at a point where I need to blog about the JotSpot (http://www.jotspot.com/) merger and how it was handled. The company I work for builds custom JotSpot Wiki’s for enterprise class companies and “was” JotSpot’s first Partner. We were JotSpot’s only Gold Partner and were evangelist of the technology during the last two years. We made a massive investment in JotSpot, learning new API’s, developing Wiki converters and custom applications for use with JotSpot.

To preface what I’m about to say, I am very happy to have worked with the JotSpot people, I learned a lot about new technologies from AJAX, XML, JSON and Wiki technology in general. I congratulate everyone at JotSpot and wish them good luck at Google.

Unfortunately, my company was one of the few (many?) who had a negative impact from the merger. Besides us, it is the other JotSpot Partners and customers who are now “left holding the bag”. What is truly interesting from our perspective is that no one at Google cares about the people who helped build the JotSpot product. Or if they do, it is through the rose colored glasses of lots of money. I guess that cures everything.

Here is what I’ve learned from this experience:

1. If you sign a partnership agreement, get some kind of notification clause that gives at least thirty days (preferably more) notice before any party terminates the agreement. We were notified of the merger on the same day it was announced and had to play fire control with our customers.

2. Look for signs of impending trouble. Before the announcement, we noticed everyone at Jot acting strange. Upgrades were being posted quickly and these changes were causing problems with nearly everyone’s code. Little or no communication occurred prior to the upgrades. Why would a company do things to hurt its customer base? Well, I guess the answer is that Google was the biggest customer and probably demanded the changes prior to purchase.

3. Pick your hosted application service provider well. Relying on web hosted application services is much more dangerous than I ever would have assumed. This is especially true for those services that are “closed source” like those of JotSpot. If an agreement is made with an application vendor like JotSpot, get some kind of service agreement that extends beyond merger/buyout. These type of agreements are a bit shaky but if the management team is any good, they’ll include them in the buyout agreement.

4. Part of the buyout agreement should include clauses specifying a roadmap. Taking an entire company “Dark” after a merger does nothing but cause problems for customers. In the JotSpot case, no one knows what Google is planning to do with JotSpot technologies. Will customer applications
continue to work?

My question to Google (and the JotSpot people) is how can you treat your customers, some of which have been there from the beginning so poorly? Does the Google mantra “do no evil” apply only when convenient? I’m wondering if the lack of customer focus will yet again provide us with another wonderful exploding “Tech Bubble” here in the valley. Just my two cents….

There was some discussion on TechMeme of the original post, but nothing significant. The interesting issue isn’t that JotSpot had an angry customer, but rather who put pressure on this blogger to pull his post and replace it with:

Sure the post was controversial, but unless it was fabricated it gave the world good information on how JotSpot treated its customers as the company was acquired. What I want to know is, what company does Kevin work for, and who pressured him to delete the post?

Other than a wiki, most of Jotspot’s plug and play applications are things that Google already has its own versions of. The acquisition may have been largely motivated by the desire to bring on board an agile team able to quickly ramp up lightweight hosted business applications for collaboration. Google may push Jotspot primarily as a project management application, one of the most important missing pieces of the company’s office platform. In fact, far more than a wiki, I’m going to guess that when Google reopens Jotspot to new users it will be as a wiki based project management service.

The Palo Alto company reports having more than 2000 customers who subscribe to services costing $5 and $200 per month. An intro page and screencast about Jotspot is still online but may not be for much longer. As of today all existing customers are no longer being charged and new account registration is closed while Jotspot is integrated with the rest of Google’s services.

Founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer are also founders of early web portal Excite, now an IAC property. Excite was once considered a darling of the early web but was first acquired for less than $10 million.

Jotspot raised one round of funding in 2004 for $5.2 million from Redpoint Ventures and Mayfield Funds. Joe Krause frequently points out that it cost only $100,000 to get Jotspot to market.

Jotspot has often been discussed as one of the most successful and established enterprise 2.0 companies and I imagine the selling price was a good one for the small startup. Details haven’t been disclosed but Jotspot is a strong company, the deal has officially closed and Google said in its last earnings call that YouTube’s all stock acquisition was unusual. Google probably paid a substantial amount of cash for Jotspot.

If Jotspot can be integrated as smoothly as so many other Google web applications have been, it will go a long ways towards strengthening Google for the upcoming web collaboration wars. How much longer until a web conferencing company is acquired?

We met with CEO Joe Kraus last week to demo the new product (and to discuss the Yahoo acquisition rumors from May, which were flatly denied).

Jotspot 2.0 takes the existing, mostly unstructured Jotspot wiki application and adds Office like functionality. The result is a wiki that allows users to add structured pages like calendars, spreadsheets, file repositories, documents, and photo galleries. Pricing for the service remains unchanged, with a free version and premium options ranging up to $200/month based on users, pages and storage.

With these changes it is our opinion that Jotspot is the best business-facing hosted wiki available. Jeremy Zawodny likes it too, but thinks they would be more successful if they stopped calling it a wiki.

Jotspot is also beta testing a non-hosted version of its wiki that is installed on a user’s server.

TechCrunch posts on Jotspot are here.

I’m putting this rumor at 85% likely, partially because Yahoo has a pre-existing business relationship with PBWiki to create wikis for Yahoo Groups. More as this develops. Our previous posts on JotSpot and its products are at this link.

As more office applications move online, JotSpot Tracker joins NumSum and the open-source TrimSpreadsheet in the spreadsheet space. While Jotspot Tracker is clearly the most polished of the three, funcionality is very limited and the small visable area leaves a lot to be desired.

Nonetheless, this is an excellent way to collaborate on simpler, smaller spreadsheets and bypass the hassle of email and chaotic version numbers. And the inport function was flawless.

From Steve Rubel and others.

JotSpot Live, a JotSpot company, launched today. They’ve created an awesome wiki tool that solves at least two common wiki problems – the specialized markup language and multiple simultaneous users.

I love wikis. We have one. They are perfect for group collaboration.

But wiki code is different from everything else and while it isn’t difficult, it’s silly to have to use it (note Social Text’s wikiwyg, however, which is a nice wysiwyg editor for wikis). And only one person can edit text at any one time.

Jotspot Live solves both of these problems. It also doesn’t require any server software. It’s a dead simple wiki application. With a few feature additions (like link and image support) it will be good enough for most people to use.

It’s built with Ruby on Rails and uses Ajax to allow dragging and dropping of text around the screen. Add users by adding their email address. The wiki has presence functionality, meaning it shows you who is live on the page at any time. Multiple users can edit text simultaneously.

Abe Fettig, who is one of the people who built JotSpot Live, writes this about it:

I’ve been working on a project at JotSpot that is so incredibly cool, I get excited every time I think about it. It’s called JotSpot Live.

JotSpot Live is a real-time wiki interface that allows multiple users to edit the same page at the same time. Calling it “SubEthaEdit for the web” is an oversimplification, but that’s probably the quickest way to wrap your head around the concept. Unlike SubEthaEdit, JotSpot Live doesn’t require any special client software: it’s a web application that runs in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, using nothing but HTML, script, and CSS.

It’s not perfect. Brian Benzinger (who also writes about JotSpot Live here) and I are editing a page right now and he’s found a bug that occurs when two users simultaneously edit text. We also noticed that if one person logs off and then back on, two separate versions of the wiki page seem to run and each person only sees themself as “present”.

Other problems: Slow load time, no image support, it doesn’t tell you who written or edited text, there is no page delete function and you can’t uninvite people once they are added.

However, all of these bugs/feature adds are easily fixed.

Fred Oliveira (TechCrunch editor) wrote a post on webreakstuff about problems with wikis and collaborative software in general in July 2005. He identified many of the problems that JotSpot Live addresses.

Pricing

Free for up to five wiki pages per month. Includes advertising.

$5/month for up to 15 pages per month. No ads.

$20/month for unlimited pages. No ads.

There are no restrictions on functionality or number of users.

Team

Joe Kraus, co-founder and CEO
Graham Spencer, co-founder and CTO
Ben Lutch, Vice President, Operations
Ken Norton, Vice President, Products
Link

Additional Reading

Ben Barren, Paul Kedrosky, Reg Cheramy, Media Guerilla