Wikia, a San Mateo company that allows groups to share information about their interests with wiki technology, has raised a second round of funding — all of it coming from Amazon.com.
It is not clear how much traction Wikia company has gained. The company says more than two thousand wiki sites have been created on its platform, edited by 30,00 registered users. Wikia wants to users do everything outside of Wikipedia’s collaborative encyclopedia process.
It enables “groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions.” Wikis are useful, because they let fans — Nascar fans, for example — find information and express themselves. But they are tricky to manage, and Wikia’s format isn’t exactly elegant. Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales, the founder Wikipedia, which is one of the rare wiki success stories so far. Part of Wikia’s round (amount undisclosed) includes the purchase of the sports community site, ArmchairGM for more than $2 million, underscoring how Wikia is having to reach out to acquire talent and technology. Wikia says it will use the ArmChairGM technology to help it incorporate user-generated news and voting into future Wikia fan sites. With Amazon behind it, Wikia could presumably be used to form wikis around various Amazon product lines. Wikia says it will look for more acquisitions.
ArmchairGM’s four founders, Dan Lewis, Aaron Wright, David Pean, and Rob Lefkowitz, will join Wikia as full time employees and will continue to run ArmchairGM independently.
Last year, Bessemer Venture Partners led a $4 million investment in the company, joined by Omidyar Network, Marc Andreessen, Dan Gillmor, Reid Hoffman, Josh Kopelman, Joichi Ito and Mitch Kapor.
Tags: co:Amazon.com, co:WikiaOne Comment
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Marshall Kirkpatrick said:
The Armchair GM guys are great - they built quite a good site and community over there. Congrats to them!
11 Trackbacks
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[...] See our story here. VentureBeat Community [...]
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Starked SF, Unforgiving News from the Bay » Blog Archive » Talk of the Town: Hump Day said:
[...] Amazon hops in the sack with Wickia. [...]
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Bessed said:
Wikia
What are the best sites about Wikia? We’ve started with these. What else should be here?
1. Wikia - “A collection of communities with websites that you can edit.” Start a wiki about a topic you care about, or add to topics that have a…
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[...] + Amazon takes major stake in Wikia (via VentureBeat) Direct to Wakia. [...]
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rexblog.com: Rex Hammock’s weblog » Blog Archive » Why the head-scratching on why Amazon invested in Wikia? said:
[...] (From the day-late news department.) VentureBeat says in reporting an investment by Amazon in Wikia, “It’s not clear how much traction Wikia company has gained.” [...]
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Wikia Launches OpenServing Blog Platform - Mashable! said:
[...] It also emerged last week that Wikia has taken a second round of funding from Amazon. Amazon has a cheap storage solution for startups called S3, but Wikia say that web services weren’t a part of the deal with Amazon. [...]
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Wikiasari, the Strolling the Web the Encyclopedic Way « Life Pond said:
[...] Wikiasari, the Strolling the Web the Encyclopedic Way 29Dec06 Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales is planning to launch a new search engine next year, called Wikiasari. As a third division of Wikia, Wales has raised over $4 million, including a donation from Amazon (Amazon has nothing to do with this new venture), and would surely be a great success as large as Wikipedia. He says, …Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that… [...]
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SplashCast: Channel Yourself Across the Web said:
[...] if you’re not familiar, is a website that anyone can edit (see also video below). ArmchairGM was acquired by a larger wiki company called Wikia last year. It’s a place for people to talk and write [...]
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Niche social networks welcome: Wikia open sources social tools » VentureBeat said:
[...] For a good example of a social network built into a wiki-based site check out ArmchairGM, the sports wiki database, which Wikia purchased in December of 2006 for more than $2 million (our coverage). [...]
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MediaWiki’s Social Profile extends White Label Social Networking « The Analytics Guru said:
[...] can see Wikia’s social networking features live at the popular sports community ArmchairGM (acquired by Wikia for $2m) and the newly re-launched Halopedia, a community for Halo [...]
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Wikia Open Sources Social Networking - Focused Networking Now Open to All « The “Meta” Internet: The genesis of a “virtual” Silicon Valleys leveraging the power of the Internet. said:
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