Does your small business have several employees spread across the country or working from home at various locations? Wouldn’t it be nice to share internal files for your business from one centralized location or information repository?

Using wiki software can help you overcome many of those obstacles by creating an internal database of online customer contact lists, online spreadsheets and files and company calendars that are accessible from anywhere in the country.

The featured guest in this episode of Small Business Trends Radio is Joe Kraus, CEO & Founder of JotSpot. In this episode Joe explains how a wiki can help small business owners by keeping the most current information stored in one centralized location that is accessible by all of your employees and selected customers.

Among the points in the show are:

• Today’s wiki vs. early wiki software. When Joe first saw wikis three years ago, he says they were “trapped in the land of the nerds.” It looked like old DOS instead of the more graphical interfaces we use today on the Web. Today’s wikis take approximately 30 seconds to set up and offer user friendly software that is stored on a centralized server that allows users to view, edit and update the content.

• Two examples stand out. For the movie Lucky Number Slevin, Hollywood used a Jotspot wiki to do the planning for the production of this movie. This allowed people to collaborate all over the country. There is also ebaywiki.com which allows eBay sellers to use a wiki for learning how to sell better on ebay. Additionally, the world’s largest wiki is Wikipedia, an encyclopedia written on a wiki platform.

• One of the benefits of using wikis. It helps to cut back on duplicate document versions - or “versionitis” and eliminates internal email overload that accumulates in attempts to communicate and exchange company information with employees.

Today’s Trend: In addition to the above points, please stay tuned at the end of the program to the Today’s Trend segment. The Today’s Trend for this episode is: The Coming Of Age Of Local Search. Today’s Trend examines how local search is rapidly evolving. Small businesses do most of their business within a 50 mile radius and rely on local customers. Explore some of the latest local search capabilities such as local.com, truelocal.com and shoplocal.com that allow users to drill down their searches by zip code, city, state and more.

Recorded: October 3, 2006

Duration: 53:29 minutes

About Joe Kraus

Joe Kraus is co-founder and CEO of JotSpot, the first application-wiki company. A long time entrepreneur, Joe has been involved with early-stage technology development and starting companies for more than twelve years. Upon graduation from Stanford University in 1993, he joined with five engineering friends to found the highly successful Internet company, Excite, Inc. The original president of Excite, Joe was deeply involved in product strategy, direction and vision as the company grew. He also held senior operational roles in business development, international development and content.

After leaving Excite@Home in 2000, Joe was a co-founder of Digitalconsumer.org, a non-profit grassroots consumer organization with more than 50,000 members dedicated to protecting consumers fair-use rights to digital media. Joe, along with other co-founder Graham Spencer, continues to work on these important issues. In addition to his non-profit focus, he has also spent many years as an angel investor, working with numerous early-stage technology companies.

To learn more, visit JotSpot.

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