John Gotts, the entrepreneur who agreed to pay $3 million for the domain name Wiki.com and reportedly told people he was “going to kill Wikipedia” may have thrown in the towel after just a few months. Instead of launching the promised Wiki site with MindTouch software, the Wiki.com site now simply redirects to Wikia, another wiki service affiliated with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. → Read More
I was going through CEO Gil Penchina’s Wikia presentation slides at the Le Web conference in Paris last month and noticed something that made me realize they could be a huge site some day. According to the company, Wikia is producing 2.5 million page views per day and growing steadily, and their new article growth rate tracks the early days of Wikipedia, nearly identically. The key slide… → Read More
A couple of days ago I posted a screenshot of what I believed to be an early version of the new Wikiasari search engine that Jimmy Wales has been talking about. Our source was good, and I went with it. But Wales is saying that the screenshot has nothing to do with the project, in a comment to that post and also on the Wikiasari page on Wikia (since taken down, but screenshot is here). The… → Read More
Update 12/25/06: Jimmy Wales says this isn’t a Wikiasari screen shot. So what is it? The Times reported earlier today that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is planning to launch a new search engine next year, to be called Wikiasari. He’s clearly aiming for Google. He says: “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. → Read More
Wikia founder Jimmy Wales believes in “free content for all.” That is why the company launched OpenServing today, a service that is giving away complete Web hosting support to any wiki developer – for free! OpenServing allows anyone to setup and maintain their own collaborative site. Wales told TechCrunch in a phone call today that OpenServing is also intended to go beyond wiki… → Read More
Wikia, a for-profit sister site of Wikipedia, received a second round of funding today, all of it coming from Amazon. No word yet on how much Amazon has forked over. Just this week, Wikia announced that they would purchase ArmchairGM, an online sports community, for $2 million in cash and Wikia stock. In March, we reported that the company received $4 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and… → Read More
Wikia will announce the acquisition of ArmchairGM sometime this week, according to a source close to the transaction. The company was bought for $2 million in cash and Wikia stock. We briefly mentioned ArmchairGM in a post about a competitor a couple of months ago. The service, which was created by four guys in New York, is a sort of digg-wiki-sports hybrid thing. Apparently the technology is… → Read More
Wikia has quietly launched semi-private college/university wikis. And they’ve taken a page out of Facebook’s game plan by requiring users to have an approved university email address in order to edit the wiki. The wiki itself, however, is viewable by everyone. The goal is to have better data by keeping out people who aren’t directly affiliated with the university. On the… → Read More
Wikia, a for-profit offshoot of Wikipedia, will announce the launch of a free, editable “worldwide guide of places to go and things to do” on Monday, called World Wikia. The content is very light for now, although for an example of how this might look down the road see their deep content on Roman churches. They will also announce a number of partnerships with commercial publishers to… → Read More
Gil Penchina, previously eBay’s Vice President and GM of International, is now the CEO of new startup Wikia. Wikia is the for profit sister site of Wikipedia. Where Wikipedia focuses on verifiable facts, Wikia is all about opinions – travel guides, political opinions, whatever. Wikia announced a $4 million venture round in March 2006. I spoke with Gil for a few minutes this morning… → Read More
Wikia, formerly called Wikicities, announced a $4 million Series A round today. The financing was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Omidyar Network, and had participation from angel investors Dan Gillmor, Reid Hoffman, Joichi Ito, and Mitch Kapor. David Cowan of Bessemer also wrote about this on his personal blog. Wikia is a for profit venture by Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia. → Read More
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