Wikia: ex-eBay execs and Amazon investment $$$

[mandy]

...and another:

Wikia, Inc., the leading site for developing and hosting community-based wikis, today announced that Gil Penchina, an eight-year veteran of eBay, has agreed to join the company as chief executive officer, to help Wikia build the richest guides and content around topics in which internet users are passionately interested. Currently Wikia's guides cover areas as diverse as technology product reviews, movie guides, pet care and popular video game content...

Mr. Penchina comes to Wikia from eBay where he served in a number of executive positions, including regional VP roles in Europe and Asia and as a general manager in the US...

full article: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060605/nem044.html?.v=38

[bargainbloodhound]

Wikia offers you free MediaWiki hosting for a community to build a free content wiki-based website.

Were'nt free hosted website communities supported by advertising tried 7 years ago and the general consensus after they all closed during the dot com crash was that their business models sucked?  :  Does adding the trendy Web 2.0 moniker to what is essentially a Web 1.0 business model suddenly transform it from shit to gold? Inquiring minds want to know.  :

[Kristijntje]

Update:

Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) has invested in Wikia, the for-profit wiki company co-founded by Jimmy Wales, one of the brains behind online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the start-up said Wednesday.

The Seattle online retailer did not disclose the size of its investment.

"Amazon has always believed in giving the customer as much information as possible so that they can make the purchase that's best for them," Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said in a statement. "We want to support the continued growth of sites like Wikia, which has cracked the code for user-generated content."

Wikia also announced Wednesday that it had spent more than US$2 million to buy ArmchairGM, a sports community site running on the same MediaWiki software platform used by Wikia and Wikipedia...

full article: http://ecommercetimes.com/story/eS9dzgnC...Firm.xhtml

[mandy]

Web site operators and bloggers will get free Web hosting , including all advertising  revenue from their sites, with a new service called "OpenServing" from the for-profit Wikipedia company Wikia.

The company said OpenServing will "extend the essence of the open source model," delivering not only free software and content to users but also free bandwidth, storage, computing power and ad revenue...

OpenServing represents the future of Web hosting, maintains Wales.

"As servers and bandwidth get cheaper and cheaper, it becomes easy to offer it to people who are building free content using free and open source software,"...

full article: http://ecommercetimes.com/story/8SZYA49a...ting.xhtml