Stirr & Amazon

Posted by Angela Beesley on December 8, 2006 (Events, Wiki, Wikia)

The first STIRR Sydney event (see previous post) was well worth attending, especially to hear more about the stealthy startups 3eep and Tangler, both of which have exciting plans for communities. Just as I was leaving the party, Amazon’s investment in Wikia was announced online. The hotel I was staying at had DNS issues so I’d had no Internet access all afternoon and didn’t realise the announcement was quite so imminent else I might have been able to chat about it in Sydney. Not that our ArmchairGM acquisition and our new OpenServing project weren’t enough to talk about. :)

I’m really pleased about the investment since it makes the future of Wikia not only more
stable, but also more exciting because it allows us to meet the dreams of our community members as we’ll have more resources to carry out their feature requests.
Here are two great quotes from the press release:

“We want to support the continued growth of sites like Wikia, which has cracked the code for user-generated content.” –Jeff Bezos, Amazon.

“Amazon is a leader in offering customer generated content, and we are delighted to have them as a strategic investor in Wikia. With Amazon’s support, Wikia will be able to expand and serve new communities around the globe on an even greater range of topics.” –Jimmy Wales, Wikia

1 Comment

  1. WikiAngela » End of 2006 said,

    December 31, 2006 at 13:04

    […] Wikia’s first big announcement this month was the acquisition of ArmchairGM. Robert Lefkowitz, Aaron Wright, Dan Lewis and David Pean joined Wikia as part of the acquititsion and began work on OpenServing (blog post). Wikia announced its second round of investment - all of it from Amazon - on December 8th (blog post). We had two big hits in the press shortly after this - firstly with OpenServing which is still in testing, and will be more widely available very soon, and secondly with “Wikiasari“, which didn’t really exist before the press made it up, but may well exist at some point next year. I started WikiChix, a new community for women involved with wikis, in response to concerns that women were not comfortable posting to Wikipedia’s mailing lists. Anthere invited me to chair Wikimedia’s new Advisory Board. After attending the fun Stirr Sydney event, I packed up and left Australia, at least temporarily. We spent a day and a half in London before going to see my parents. Tim spent his first Christmas away from home, with my family, and we’ll be spending new year’s at my sister’s. […]