PBwiki closed $2 million in funding this morning from Mohr Davidow Ventures.  Founder and CEO David Weekly confirmed that previous investors Ron Conway and Chris Yeh also put in an additional $100k.
PBwiki advertises itself as the easiest way to quickly create a hosted wiki and the company’s product is particularly well executed.  It recently added a What You See is What You Get editor, which if satisfactory to new users, could help PBwiki overcome one of the primary barriers to wiki adoption.  The recent upgrade also added the ability to include YouTube videos, Flickr photostreams, stock charts and chat functionality to your wikis.  Chat will likely be useful but I question how many of their users will be excited about the rest of the new features.  PBWiki’s basic features are what make it shine.
Weekly told me that there are more than 200,000 PBwikis and a substantial portion of them have been active in the past 60 days.  (My ten sleeping PBwikis notwithstanding, apparently.)  Weekly says the ads on free accounts make less than 5% of the company’s revenue; premium accounts are available for between $10 and $35 per month.  He says the 8 person company brings in enough money to be “profitable some months.”
Weekly says that he expects to make an announcement about interoperability with other wiki providers in the next few weeks.  I like PBwiki but will be curious to see what they have up their sleeve that would give confidence to institutional investors.  Mohr Davidow Ventures doesn’t typically invest in consumer facing, web 2.0 type companies.
The enterprise wiki landscape is widely seen as a mess, bereft of reliable, usable and lightweight solutions – perhaps we’ll see someone scoop up this solid service soon. Please hold the jokes about a possible Yahoo! acquisition.
Competitors include Wikispaces, Wikia and others.
I really can’t stand the word wiki. That’s all.
I don’t see this as “enterprise wiki” – without getting into details, let me just point to the complete lack of a permissioning scheme. All users have to share a single password!
Now with a more friendly editor it can gain more traction – but not in the Enterprise.
But it’s a popular (consumer) wiki nevertheless. I’ve been amazed at it’s popularity while it did not have a wysiwyg editor – but I guess geeks prefer markup language anyway
omg congrats David!
fyi, I use pbwiki at ease. I am a rage’n fan.
Zoli,
Hi! You’re right that we may not be an enterprise wiki, but the basic permissioning scheme of sharing a single password is what we give our basic (free) users. Premium users get access to a much richer suite of access controls and can invite specific users to contribute / moderate / administer or simply read, can lock pages for editing by non-admins, and can even hide pages from non-admins. We’re nearly the only kids on the block to provide a free wiki that can be made private without crazy restrictions on the number or size of pages / editors / viewers.
The demo shows the University of Michigan has an account set up, and so does Cliffs freeware. If Mohr Davidow is eyeing the university/college market — well — they like free, non-proprietary sites with ‘democracy’ written all over them. That’s the lure of wikis. How are these guys planning to monetize this without putting the users in the position of feeling they’re kissing a toad gussied up like a handsome prince?
@2 Zoli –
We enable fine-grained permissions when you upgrade to any of the premium levels, plus SSL all-the-time and optional IP-address whitelisting on the high-end packages. The die-hard wiki markup fans can stick with the classic editor, or even flip back and forth between old and new.
Sarah,
Thanks.
And thanks for coming by the last DevHouse!
By the way, I do like the site. It looks great
I love PBWiki.
If PBWiki was a girl, and looked good, I’d want to date her.
Oh hell, if David Weekly was a girl, and looked good, I’d want to date her.
Psst! I think davidu has been watching too much ‘Ugly Betty’
David, Nathan,
Thanks – I learned somehting:-) That said, would you consider PB primarily an enterprise wiki or a consumer/small group wiki?
why associate a co. name with a food product? i don’t get it
and their slogan ‘make a free wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich’ -kiind of weird, but ok i guess
making a pb sandwich isn’t that easy, sometimes the pb is so rigid it tears the bread
not to mention that recent salmonella pb outbreak recall as well
..some Drifter,
Try Nutella, much softer on your bread
Drifter:
They associate with not just any food product, but the best food product in the world: Peanut butter.
If your pb tears your bread, there’s an easy solution: use wheat.
@14 — or solve this like an engineering problem – heat the peanut butter
C’mon Ben, for someone who just finished eating his way through Europe and Asia, you can’t be serious!
the guy from iwillteachyoutoberich is part owner of PBwiki right???
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http://www.dobizo.com
I’ve been using PBwiki for the last six months. It has been a great product for collaboration on school projects. The new improvements are definitely a big step forward. In terms of their revenue model I will say that I find the premium version a bit expensive (poor student) but I think at the right price point they could gain a lot of traction in the college market. A little viral marketing wouldn’t hurt either.
I think the name and the slogan of the product is genious.
you got to be kidding me. I’m getting both browser sign up and saying
“Sorry, invalid value for pbj ().” And this cost you $2 million dollars.
I have to agree on the quote “We’re nearly the only kids on the block to provide a free wiki that can be made private without crazy restrictions on the number or size of pages / editors / viewers.” This may change if Google/Jotspot comes out from “extreme-makeover”.
I wonder what $2 million will do for PBwiki. If majority of fund are going into product development, then it would be a good chance to see a more “sexy” wiki.
I can see peanut better Stanford team is technically capable. I would be interested to see if PBwiki can be more innovative, customizable, and user-friendly.
Race is on… I am watching in the summer. I offer cookie and milk for innovation.
Also part of the new roll out is an excellent integration with the 30 Boxes calendar. We were able to allow the anonymous creation of embedded calendars which makes this instance of group calendaring really functional and best of class for a wiki. It includes both a group edit view and a read only one for those without write priviledges.
I could blow $2M on advertising in about 20 minutes
I too wonder what 2M will get on top of this framework.
Congrats guys. MDV are good people.
Congratulations David and crew!
Wikis will never enter the enterprise until people can cut and paste non-text items. Yes, I know you can manually upload images and other kinds of files somewhere and reference them with cryptic codes and stuff but why would any average office worker want to switch to 1980s style editing when they can use Exchance’s Public Folders or Notes forums and cut and paste images, word documents, powerpoint presentations, excel sheets in seconds instead of minutes and also get per item tracking and notification of changes (yea, some wiki’s support rss notification but that’s pointless if I’m not using a reader or my reader doesn’t automatically read the list often enough never to miss a notification or if I can’t also mark entries as unread/important etc.
Having managed several produces through both Notes and Exchange I can say wiki’s cryptic codes and cumbersome attachment issues end up making people give up.
When someone provides real no compromise solution they will own this market
Until THAT problem is solved, wikis will only be for geeks
And the 2M helps them buy more pb, why not? At least people will stop making those stories about starving in college..
I can’t believe the ra-ra; 2 things stand out more than others
- They claim SSL security .. and offer”enterprise level security” for the $35/month package. I don’t want to pay $35 so I get “poormans security”? who came up with this strategy
- Nowhere (even in this writeup) is mentioned that the free account comes with 10 MB of space and ~0 customization.
You can get free 1G+ storage + free calendar + free email and can do the same things .. so what’s the “mass apeal”? The classroom app is interesting but I doubt any school will pay $350/class?teacher? for it.
I offer you an advanced entry into the dead pool for this one.
This is a very crowded space. At our last count, there were 90 different wiki solutions, most of them free downloadable open source packages, but more and more available online.
I’ve used pbwiki, wasn’t so impressed. IMHO, when targeting the mainstream WYSIWYG is a must, and other wikis already offer it.
But hopefully these $2M will help improve the user experience…
@28 – RE: SSL, everyone gets encrypted logins. What you get in the premium package is *all* edits end-to-end encrypted. For most folks, particularly those with public wikis, this would be wild overkill and consumes resources on our servers. As for schools not being willing to pay $10/month for a critical classroom resource…well, I give you NASD:BBBB as reasonable evidence to the contrary.
@29 – At the point that Step 1 for a solution is “install this on your Linux server”, how many people do you think will stick around?
Give PBwiki a whirl again, we’ve got pretty sweet WYSIWYG now.
Clif:
Congratulation. Look forward to seeing more good news on PBwiki.
Mike Chou (efly)
How does it stack up against jot?
I know jot has been offering much more even before the google takeover, and I can only imagine that when they do a new roll out, which i believe soon, there will be even more features offered. The way google will probably do it, is to give out all the rich features for free, and mayb charge some really premium accounts.
When that comes, most users will end up with google
Prior to the takeover, jot is also known for encouraging third party developers to help build their widget-based. This is something pbwiki needs to do quickly if it wants to have enough feature to fend off jot+google.
Can pbwiki handle jot+google?
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