| By Scott Kveton | March 2nd, 2007 | Comments [4]
PBwiki, the world’s largest wiki hosting provider, today announced it is acquiring Schtuff, a popular wiki host. Schtuff is built by JanRain, a technology company based in Portland, Oregon. This acquisition follows several recent announcements by PBwiki including a partnership with 30 Boxes, a fundraising round by Mohr Davidow Ventures announced last week, and record growth.
Wikis, such as the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, are increasingly popular with consumers for collaborative projects like online classrooms, hobby groups, and business projects. PBwiki, which hosts well over 150,000 wikis and millions of visitors per month, hosts wikis in three popular categories: education, business, and consumer. These categories are a natural fit for Schtuff’s wikis, which include millions of hits and hundreds of thousands of pages of user-generated content. Schtuff is owned by parent company JanRain.
“We’re thrilled to have Schtuff join the PBwiki family,” said Ramit Sethi, co-founder and VP of Marketing for PBwiki. “A community of a million users joins PBwiki today.”
JanRain announced the sale to focus on its core of identity services. “We’re excited about this deal because we wanted to focus on our core of identity services around OpenID while still taking care of the Schtuff community,” said Scott Kveton, CEO of JanRain. “PBwiki has the best community and the best people, hands down. They were the obvious choice.” As part of the acquisition, PBwiki announced that it would support OpenID in an upcoming release.
Terms of the deal were undisclosed, but funds for the acquisition came from recent PBwiki revenue. The acquisition was announced on March 2, 2007.
March 2, 2007 at 7:53 pm
[…] Schtuff acquired by PBWiki. OpenID provider JanRain has sold their popular wiki platform (and userbase) to the recently funded PBWiki. JanRain will continue to narrow its focus on the OpenID platform with MyOpenID and PBWiki gains a million users for an undisclosed purchase price. Seems a win/win for both parties in my opinion. […]
March 2, 2007 at 8:42 pm
[…] You may have heard it around, but we’re super happy to welcome Schtuff.com into the PBwiki family. (For you folks who […]
March 6, 2007 at 6:57 pm
[…] PBwiki is the world’s largest wiki hosting company, with over 150,000 wikis and millions of visitors per month. The Schtuff.com acquisition is expected to add as many as a million monthly visitors to PBwiki’s network. […]
March 30, 2007 at 12:26 am
[…] they recently received over $2 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures, acquired competitor Schtuff, struck a deal with 30Boxes and unveiled a new point-and-click editor. In other words, […]