Yet again, today Google made another interesting move, buying a wiki company called JotSpot. Basically a wiki is an online tool that helps groups collaborate using user editable pages.

To get some perspective on the deal, I talked Mark Kurtz, who is the VP of Sales and Marketing at MindTouch.

First, what is the background of your company?

MindTouch is a leading provider of hosted, appliance-based and open source wiki solutions. Privately held, MindTouch is based in San Diego, California.

Why do you think Google bought JotSpot?

Wikis provide a quick way to drive user generated content. Online communities thrive around compelling and relevant content. By having wiki technology as part of the Google offering, imagine the amount of new users and new content that will be added. This is Google's business and they are extremely good at being a visionary in this space.

Content is currency. Google knows this better than any other company. The YouTube acquisition is a perfect example of driving eyeballs based on content they did not have to pay to develop. It is easy to see where Google is going to address the consumer market.

Although, how Google will monetize the existing wiki user base (non-ad revenue based) for businesses remains unclear.

What might this mean for wikis?

This provides very clear market validation for wiki technology. This really represents a very fundamental shift in how applications are built; not only on the technical side, but also on human-machine interaction dynamics. Online collaborative systems require either some pretty heavy policy-enforcement infrastructure or an application design paradigm that makes collective efforts open and safe. The latter is the wiki-way of doing things. Market leaders like Google see the incredible power that wikis bring to foster communities, global collaboration, and stickiness to web sites.

Also, is Google trying to go more into the corporate market?

This seems to go into the consumer/SMB play to go along with previous acquisitions. Most of the corporations MindTouch deals with are very hesitant to store data, calendars, and email on someone else's searchable infrastructure. Does it make sense for some companies? I guess it does. However, we're anticipating that a high percentage of corporations are going to want to keep their systems internal for quite some time.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and operates InvestorOffering.com.

This morning – 6:30 AM pacific – I talked to the CEO and co-founder of JotSpot, Joe Kraus. I think he hasn't had much time to sleep. You see, he just sold his company to Google , Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). In fact, he wrote about it on the Google blog.

Joe started his company about three years ago with a laser focus on developing a top-notch wiki product. Basically, a wiki allows for groups to collaborate on projects. In some cases, the projects can be enormous, such as with Wikipedia.

However, for the most part, wikis are still in the early stages, but with the Google deal, this should change quickly. Says Joe: "We wanted to bring wikis to the biggest audience possible."

Joe is an Internet veteran, having cofounded one of the early portals, Excite. He has taken his consumer knowledge and applied it to JotSpot; that is, the product is easy yet powerful.

It is no secret that Google is focusing much more on collaboration. There has been lots of evidence of this from things like Writely, Google Groups and the Google Spreadsheet.

I also think Google has ambitions for moving much more into the corporate space (but with a Web 2.0 approach.)

No doubt, in this deal, Google has validated the importance of wikis -- and other major companies, like Yahoo , Inc.(NASDAQ:YHOO) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) will likely respond. In other words, startup wiki companies like Socialtext, Near-Time and others may be buyout bait.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and operates InvestorOffering.com.

Of course, the next big thing from Google – a spreadsheet – is not new. After all, spreadsheets were one of the first key applications for the PC during the 1980s.

Yet, the Google Spreadsheet is very important, as the company is attempting to turn software into a service that lives on the Internet, not something that has to be purchased and installed.

Don't worry, Wall Street analysts will not dump their Microsoft Excel for the free Google alternative. Then again, this is not the vision for Google; rather, it provides a simple-to-use product. This is not to say it is simplistic. Actually, Google Spreadsheet has a comprehensive set of functions for math, finance and statistics. You can also import Excel spreadsheets (you will not lose the formatting in the process).

However, there are no charts; no printing; and no use of the right mouse button.