Lycos
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| File:Lycos Logo.png | |
 A screenshot of Lycos.com | |
| Type of business | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
Type of site | Search Engine and Web Portal |
| Available in | multilingual |
| Founded | 1994 |
| Headquarters | Waltham, Massachusetts |
| Revenue |  $ UNKNOWN |
| Employees | 72 in US (2007) |
| Parent |  Daum Communications |
| URL | Lycos Search Home |
| Registration | optional |
| Launched | April 13, 1995 |
| Current status | active |
Lycos is a search engine and web portal with broadband entertainment content.
History
Lycos began as a search engine research project by Dr. Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University in 1994. Bob Davis joined the company as its CEO and first employee in 1995. Lycos then enjoyed several years of growth and, in 1999, became the most visited online destination in the world, with a global presence in more than 41 countries. Lycos was sold to Terra Networks of Spain in May 2000 for $5.4 billion, forming a new company Terra Lycos and maintaining a position as one of the world's largest Internet companies. Shortly after the merger, Davis left the company to become a venture capitalist with Highland Capital Partners in Boston. In October 2004, Lycos was sold by Terra's parent company Telefonica to Daum Communications Corporation, the second largest Internet portal in Korea, becoming once again Lycos Inc.
Corporate Development
Shortly after the development of the search engine, Lycos Inc. was formed with approximately US$2 million in venture capital funding from CMGI. The founder and CEO of Lycos since interception was Bob Davis, a Boston native who incorporated the company in Massachusetts and concentrated on building it into an advertising-supported web portal. Lycos grew from a crowded field in 1995 to become the most-visited web portal in the world in the spring of 1999 (as measured by visits to all of its sites).
In 1996, the company completed the fastest IPO from inception to offering in NASDAQ history, and, in 1997, became one of the first profitable internet businesses in the world. In 1998 it paid $58 million for Tripod in an attempt to "break into the portal market" which was rapidly developing;[2] over the course of the next few years this was followed by nearly two dozen acquisitions of high profile internet brands including Gamesville, WhoWhere, Wired Digital (sold to Wired), Quote.com, Angelfire and Raging Bull.
Lycos Europe was a joint venture between Bertelsmann and Lycos but has always been a distinct corporate entity. Although Lycos Europe is the largest of the overseas ventures several other companies also entered into joint venture agreements including Lycos Canada, Lycos Korea and Lycos Asia.
Near the peak of the internet bubble in May 2000, Lycos announced its intent to be acquired by Terra Networks, the internet arm of the Spanish telecommunications giant Telefónica, for $5.4 billion. The acquisition price represented a nearly 3000 times return on the initial venture capital investment in Lycos and about 20 times its initial public offering valuation. The transaction closed in October 2000. The merged company was renamed Terra Lycos yet the Lycos brand was the US franchise. Overseas the company continued to be known as Terra Networks, Davis left the company shortly after the merger was completed to join Highland Capital Partners, a premier venture capital fund where he now serves as a Managing General partner and concentrates on internet investments.
On August 2, 2004, Terra announced that it was selling Lycos to Seoul, South Korea-based Daum Communications Corporation for $95.4 million in cash, less than 2% of Terra's initial multi-billion investment. In October 2004, the transaction closed and the company name was changed back to Lycos Inc.The remaining Terra half of the business was subsequently reacquired by Telefónica.
Under new ownership, Lycos began to refocus its strategy in 2005, moving away from a search-centric portal torwards a community destination for broadband entertainment content. With a new management team in place, Lycos also began divesting properties that were not core to its new strategy. In July 2006, Wired News, which had been part of Lycos since the purchase of Wired Digital in 1998, was sold to Condé Nast and re-merged with Wired magazine. The Lycos Finance division, best known for Quote.com and Raging Bull.com, was sold to FT Interactive Data Corporation in February 2006, while its online dating site, Matchmaker.com, was sold to Date.com. In 2006, Lycos also regained ownership of the Lycos trademark from Carnegie Mellon University becoming Lycos Inc. once again.
During 2006, Lycos introduced services, including Lycos Phone, which combined IM video chat, real-time video on demand and an MP3 player. In August of the same year, a new version of Lycos Mail was released, which allowed sending and receiving mega files, including unlimited size file attachments. In November 2006, Lycos began to roll out applications centered around social media, including the web's first[citation needed] watch & chat video application, with the launch of its "Lycos Cinema" platform. In February 2007 "Lycos MIX" was launched a tool allowing users to pull video clips from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video and MySpace Video, creating playlists where other users can add video comments and chat in real-time.
Lycos Network sites
- Angelfire [1], a Lycos property providing free webhosting, blogging and web publishing tools
- Gamesville [2], Lycos's massive multiplayer gaming site
- Hotbot [3], a Lycos-owned search engine
- HtmlGear [4], a Lycos property providing web-page addons (guestbooks, etc.)
- Tripod.com [5], a Lycos property providing free webhosting, blogging and web publishing tools
- Webon [6], a next generation webhosting and publishing platform
- WhoWhere.com [7], a people search engine
Lycos-branded sites
- Lycos Domains [8], Internet domain name purchasing
- Lycos Mail [9], a email provider formerly known as Mailcity.com.
- Lycos Planet [10], Lycos social networking and light web-building site. It is the successor to Lycos Circles, which was shut down in September 2005.
- Lycos Retriever [11], an automatically generated information summarization service.
- Lycos Cinema [12], an online video and social networking site. (This service closed on April 29th 2009.)
- Lycos MIX [13], a video playlist chat and social networking site.
Former Lycos sites
- GetRelevant, a Lycos online advertising site
- Quote.com and Raging Bull, finance sites
- Matchmaker.com, a dating site
- Webmonkey, web-building help and tutorials
- Wired.com, the online arm of Wired magazine
- Lycos Radio, allowed users to create and host their own free internet radio shows
References
- ^ lycos.com - Traffic Details from Alexa
- ^ Price, Christopher (1998-12-15). "Gateway to the future: Christopher Price gives the lowdown on the sites which offer not only a way into the worldwide web but so much more". Financial Times. p. 16.