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.

Wiki Developer Talks About Google's Deal for JotSpot originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 31 Oct 2006 17:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.