Q&A With Joe Kraus: From Excite.com to Wikis

Joe Kraus is a serial entrepreneur. A founder of Excite.com, he is now heading up a new venture, JotSpot, a venture-backed Wiki company. He recently spoke with Nathan Kaiser.

Kaiser: What is JotSpot?

Kraus: JotSpot is a venture-backed company started two years ago. It is what most people would consider a hosted Wiki, but we like to think about JotSpot in the long-term as a pioneer of do-it-yourself applications.

The industry has spent the last 10 years on do-it-yourself publishing on the net, making it easier for a non-technical person to put words on a page that someone else can read. On the other hand, very little, if any, time has been spent trying to make it easier for an end-user to build an application online.

JotSpot is starting out in the do-it-yourself publishing arena with Wikis, but what we're really trying to accomplish over the long term is to enable end-users to build simple, lightweight, web-based applications.

These applications seem to be primarily targeted toward company intranets.

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Nathan Kaiser is the founder of nPost.com, which interviews executives and entrepreneurs about their businesses and philosophies.