VentureBeat

Wikis have been popularized over the last several years as group-friendly ways to share information. They let people collaborate on projects from one place online, letting you do useful things like track who made what change to the text of a document in a wiki.

PBwiki has been one of the companies leading the charge. Today, it claims to be the largest provider of hosted business wikis, with more than 30,000 businesses on board, company chief executive David Weekly tells me. The second-place competitor is Atlassian, he says, with around 8,000 businesses.

Check out my full interview with Weekly for more details on the company, which he says is seeing strong growth across many different industries. As you’ll hear, he talks about how the company offers hosted wikis for schools, businesses and others, makes money from selling premium services, and has been rolling out a number of features.

Our previous coverage of the company here.

Just when you thought there were too many lightweight wiki companies around, another one is emerging with momentum.

Pbwiki has raised $2 million more from Mohr Davidow Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture firm, as has been reported elsewhere.

Wikis are Web sites that let multiple people edit their pages, the most famous one being Wikipedia. They’re good for people working in small groups on projects. Why would Mohr Davidow invest in this, when you’ve already got a raft of early players, from Socialtext, to Jot (now owned by Google, and closed to new users for now), WetPaint (which just raised 9.5 million last month from competing firm Accel Partners) and Wikispaces, not to mention the fast-growing Wikia (which is, however, slightly different, in that its wikis are structured according to thematic area, much like magazines on a rack, as opposed to individuals pursuing their own projects)? None of them are exactly rollingin the dough.

VentureBeat talked with seed investor Chris Yeh (who invested again in this latest around, along with seed investor Ron Conway), and Mohr Davidow’s David Feinleib. Yeh said Pbwiki has doubled its wiki growth over the past six months, which he believes is faster than chief independent competitors Wetpaint or Wikispaces (Socialtext has focused on corporate customers of late). Pbwiki now says it has more than 200,000 wikis, up from 130,000 in November, when we first reported on the company.

Feinleib said he was impressed with founder David Weekly’s reputation, and ability to get such traction with just $350,000 of seed funding. As for kicking the tires on whether Pbwikis’ numerous wikis were being created by real people, as opposed to spammers/squatters, Feinleib said he typed “Pbwiki” into some search engines and found enough convincing action. Notably, Feinleib said Mohr Davidow is “looking more aggressively at deals like this,” after not having made many new consumer Internet investments recently. However, he said he’s looking for evidence a company can make money, and noted Pbwiki’s premium accounts, which can be bought for between $10 and $35 month for extra features. It is now about break-even. We too opened an account at Pbwiki, and it has an easy feel to it. Like most wikis, you do have to go through the adjustment of figuring out how to create and organize new pages. It has many of the typical Web 2.0 features integrated; you can upload videos and other files into your wiki.

(Updated: Corrected PBWiki seed amount and added reference to Seraph investor)

Here’s the latest news on the Google bull in the Silicon Valley china shop:

Google unveils a Gmail application via your mobile phone — Phone must be Java enabled. It lets you get Gmail directly, bypassing browser.

Socialtext launches second round of Wiki Wars — After Google buys the wiki company Jot, competitors in the wiki industry scrambled to respond. Chief among them is Socialtext, which took issue with our earlier statement that it is struggling. Socialtext’s chief executive Ross Mayfield has since offered users of JotSpot’s wiki sever product, the JotBox, free migration over to Socialtext for a year. Jot, for some reason, had discontinued the JotBox, which serves large companies. Mayfield wouldn’t comment on his revenue traction. He did say, though, that this is “round two of the Wiki Wars.” (For background, we wrote an article two years ago about the Wiki Wars, featuring heavily backed Jot against the more frugal Socialtext — that original story is now long gone behind Merc’s archive wall). Mayfield has launched a number of products and redesigns recently. He says there’s plenty of room for multiple players, citing Gartner prediction that 50 percent of large companies will be using wikis by 2008. He’s aggressively hiring in engineering and sales, he adds.

PBWiki is here too! — We also heard from the guys at PBWiki is in San Bruno. They’re just three guys in a single office and host 130,000 wikis, which they claim is the biggest wiki hosting service. David Weekly, Ramit Sethi and Nathan Schmidt are all Staford guys in their 20s. They’ve taken $350,000 from Seraph (an
angel group), Chris Yeh (Symphoniq) and Ron Conway (prolific angel investor).

The Google binge machine timeline — Here’s an Ajax chart of Google’s acquisitions through time. You’ll have to scroll down to the blue table, and then start dragging the map.

Google Base 2? — Google Blogoscoped has the scoop on the latest Google classifieds project.

Google co-founder buys a place in New York — Don’t know who, or why.

UTube sues Youtube — This news has been widely covered, but as usual, Techdirt has good perspective.

Speculative stuff about bribery on YouTube deal –Lots of people pointing entrepreneur Mark Cuban’s blog on dubious stuff that went down between Google, YouTube and the music labels right before the GooTube acquisition, and some are calling it bribery. We didn’t point to it initially, because even the original anonymous source says some of it was based on speculation (if that’s not a warning signal, don’t know what is). But it has appeared everywhere, so we point to it too.

Google launches sponsored videos — You produce a video, Google gives you a cut of the revenue from ads appearing beside the video. Google kicks it off with the latest Diet Coke and Mentos video.

Google flexes political muscle, funds Republicans & everyone else — Details here.