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Excite is an Internet portal with an included search engine. It is one of the most recognized brands on the Internet, and along with Yahoo! and Netscape was one of the pioneering "dotcoms" of the 1990s. Download high resolution version (832x514, 107 KB)Screen shot of excite. ...
Download high resolution version (832x514, 107 KB)Screen shot of excite. ...
Web portals are sites on the World Wide Web that typically provide personalized capabilities to their visitors. ...
A search engine or search service is a program designed to help find information stored on a computer system such as the World Wide Web, inside a corporate or proprietary network or a personal computer. ...
Yahoo! Inc. ...
Netscape is the general name for a series of web browsers originally produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, but now developed by AOL. The original browser was once the dominant browser in terms of usage share, but it now has only a relatively small number of users. ...
See also 1990s, the band Seinfeld was a pop cultural phenomenon during the 90s and became one of the most popular TV programs ever. ...
Offerings Excite offers a variety of services, including search, web-mail, stock quotes, and a customizable user homepage. The news and other content on the portal is provided by over 100 different providers. Homepage or Home may refer to: Home page, the start page or main web page of a website The website of a group, company, or organization A personal homepage, usually a page featuring an individual user The URL or local file that is automatically loaded when a web browser starts...
Content can mean Comfort and a feeling of satisfaction Creations, as in open content or free content. ...
History Excite was founded as Architext in 1994 by Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch, Joe Kraus, Graham Spencer, and Martin Reinfried. The founders were all students in computer science (except for Kraus, who was a political science major) at Stanford University. They managed to get a $4000 investment from Institutional Venture Partners to start the company. It took another year, until December 1995, to launch Excite on the web. 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated as the International Year of the Family and the International Year of the Sport and the Olympic Ideal. // Events January Bill Clinton January 1 : North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) goes into effect. ...
Graham Spencer is a co-founder of the Excite search engine along with Joe Kraus. ...
Stanford redirects here. ...
In 1996, the company bought two search engines, Magellan and WebCrawler, and went public with an initial offering of two million shares priced at $17 USD. It gained exclusive distribution agreements with companies such as Netscape, Microsoft and Apple Computer. 1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ...
See WebCrawler for the specific search engine of that name. ...
In December 1998 Excite was in serious merger negotiations with Yahoo! inc in an agreement to purchase the Excite portal for a price between $5.5 billion and $6 billion. On Dec. 19, at Kleiner Perkins prompting @Home Network's Chairman and Chief Executive Thomas Jermoluk met with Excite’s Chairman and Chief Executive George Bell, according to documents filed with the SEC and a deal was hashed out for the purchase of Excite and it’s debt. 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ...
Yahoo! Inc. ...
Kleiner Perkins is a famous silicon valley venture capital firm. ...
George Antonio Bell Mathey (born October 21, 1959, San Pedro de Macorís, Dominican Republic) was a Major League Baseball player. ...
On January 19, 1999, Excite was acquired by @Home Network; the largest high speed cable Internet service provider. The $6.7 billion merger became one of the largest mergers of two Internet companies ever; the combined entity would marry the profitable high speed internet network of @Home and expand its existing Home.com portal with Excite’s search engine and Internet portal. The combined entity external name became Excite@Home however the stock symbol and regulatory filing records remained properly known as At Home Corporation (ATHM). 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ...
@Home Network Operated as High Speed Cable Internet Service provider from 1998 to 2002. ...
A side effect of the deal @Home’s Chairman and Chief Executive George Tom Jermoluk (also called T.J. for short) stepped down as Chief Executive Officer, but remained Chairman of the board and Excite’s former Chairman and Chief Executive George Bell who was the President of the Excite division of @Home, moved over as Chief Executive of the new Excite@Home entity.
The new Excite devision took the existing @home.com web portal that was provided to subscribers of the service and merged it with the Excite portal. Along with this was the movement toward personalized web portal content, a concept now commonplace in all internet portals today.
In just months following the merger Excite@Home's Excite devision purchased iMall for about $425 million in stock. Most significant of these was purchase of the online greeting card company Blue Mountain Arts, Excite@Home issued 11.2 million shares, worth close to $430 million, and paid $350 million in cash. In addition Excite paided for sponsorship of Infiniti Indy car driver Eddie Cheever, Jr., through the 2000 and 2001 Indy racing seasons for an undisclosed amount.
The merger between Excite and @Home fell disastrously short of expectations though, the stock once soring at $128.34 a share in the first quarter of 1999 and had a market cap of $35 billion; had fallen to $1 a share by the third quarter of 2001 when the company formerly filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The new Chief Executive George Bell worked from his home in Massachusetts and the Chief Financial Officer Mark McEachen lived in LA, flying in only once per week to the bay area to conduct business, both executives were part of the former Excite executive team. More significantly, expenses ran far ahead of revenues. The burst of the dot-com bubble in March of 2000 and the subsiquent collapse of internet advertising market further limited the company's prospects by making it harder to raise investor money to keep the company afloat in the absence of retained earnings. By 2001, the company was running out of cash. The Dot-com bubble (or dot-com speculative bubble) refers to the approximately four years of time (1997–2001) in which stock markets in Western nations had their value increase rapidly and most significantly in the technology and new Internet sector. ...
On September 21, 2000 George Bell stepped down as Chief Executive Officer and reprised his role as President of the Excite devision. The stock was trading at $15.38 a share a drop of 90% of the companies evaluation during his leadership. On April 23, 2001 Patti S. Hart, the former Chief Executive Officer of Telocity joined Excite@Home as its 3rd CEO and @Home's 4th. In the same announcement Current Chairman George Bell resigned and left the company completely. The news was not good as the company also reported first-quarter net loss of $61.6 million, or 15 cents per share, on revenue of $142.8 million compared with a loss of $4.6 million, or 1 cent, on revenue of $138 million in the same period the prior year.
On June 11, 2001 Excite@home announced what it had raised $100 million in fresh financing from the Promethean Capital Management and Angelo Gordon & Co. Part of the deal not widely disclosed was that the loan was repayable immediately if Excite@Home stock is delisted by Nasdaq.The loan, structured as a note convertible into shares of Excite, had an interest rate of zero. The key aspect of the deal was that Prometheus gain first dibs on Excite's assets.
By August 20, 2001, they fired their auditor firm Ernst & Young replacing them with PricewaterhouseCoopers the same firm used for two decades by AT&T. In addition they, received a demand for the immediate repayment of $50 million in debt from convertible bond holder Promethean Capital Management and Angelo Gordon & Co. At the same time both Cox Cable and Comcast announced that they would seperate from the Broadband Internet service by Q1 of 2002. Ernst & Young is one of the largest professional services firms in the world, and a Big 4 accountancy firm, along with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and KPMG // History The firm as we know it today is the result of a series of mergers of ancestor organizations. ...
On September 13, 2001 Excite@Home sold Blue Mountain Arts for $35 million toto American Greetings at less than 5% of what they had paid less than two years earlier.
On October 1, 2001 the company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California. The companies remaining 1,350 employees would be layed off over the following months into the first quarter of 2002. As part of the agreement @Home's national high-speed fiber network access would be sold back to AT&T for $307 million in cash. At Home Liquidating Trust, became the successor company to Excite@Home charged with the sale of all assets of the former company.
In the midst of this chaos, a small Irvington, NY based Internet company, iWon.com, had quietly started designing a new, yet familiar, Excite website hoping that they could acquire the Excite.com domain and brand in the bankruptcy proceedings. A few weeks later, the company made a $10 million (USD) joint bid with InfoSpace, a Seattle Internet company, to purchase the domain and brand, but no other technology assets or employees. On November 28, the court accepted the bid and gave iWon less than three weeks to launch a new Excite portal. iWon is an Internet portal and search engine that offers users the chance to win money by earning entries in a sweepstakes. ...
Domain has several meanings: // General some kind of territory, such as (for example) a demesne or a realm synonymous with a metaphorical field, e. ...
InfoSpace is a leader in mobile entertainment, private-label search and online directory. ...
"I feel like a guy who lived through a hurricane, got pounded and pounded and managed to survive when everyone else was destroyed," Bill Daugherty, iWon's founder and then co-chief executive time told The New York Times. "Suddenly you walk outside and because of the storm you have beachfront property. That's what Excite is to us."
On Sunday, December 16, 2001, iWon launched the new Excite and transferred millions of Excite users, along with their customized start pages, email accounts, and stock portfolios, to their new home. For its part in the acquisition, Infospace owned and operated the web search function on Excite, an arrangement that proved to be short sighted for iWon as search became a big business on the Internet in the years to follow.
iWon changed its corporate name to the Excite Network, and continued to operate Excite, in addition to iWon and a third portal, MyWay. Outside of the United States, Excite Italia took control of portals in Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Austria.
Excite continued to operate without many upgrades until the Excite Network was acquired by Ask.com in March 2004. Ask Jeeves promised to rejuvenate iWon and Excite, but those upgrades didn't happen. Ask Jeeves management became distracted, according to the East Bay Business Times, first by a search feature arms race with Google and Yahoo!, and then by its $1.85 billion merger with Barry Diller's InterActive Corporation, announced in March of 2005. Ask. ...
2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Barry Diller at the Web 2. ...
"Hopefully, as we start to invest more and get the staff in place and some of the changes to the portal properties that we want, we hope to see (revenue) grow back in the latter half of the year," said Ask Jeeves CEO Steve Berkowitz during a conference call with analysts on April 27, 2005.
On May 20, 2005, Ask Jeeves made two announcements regarding steps towards bringing the Excite brand back together again.
In one announcement, Ask Jeeves said it had acquired Excite Italia B.V., the operator of Excite Europe, from Tiscali, S.p.A., giving the company ownership of Excite's Internet domains throughout Europe as well as control of existing portals in Spain, Italy, France, UK, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. This leaves Asia as the only region where the Excite brand is not owned by Ask Jeeves.
Ask Jeeves also announced a comprehensive settlement of litigation with InfoSpace involving Excite in the United States. Under the terms of the agreement, both Ask Jeeves and InfoSpace would share marketing costs and revenue from the Excite web search function. "We look forward to working with InfoSpace to enhance the search experience on Excite, now that our interests are aligned," said Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask Jeeves.
Ownership Excite is now owned by IAC Search & Media, which is also the parent of Ask.com and Evite, and is part of Barry Diller's InterActiveCorporation. Barry Diller at the Web 2. ...
IAC/InterActiveCorp NASDAQ: IACI is an American conglomerate with interests in electronic retailing, Internet and interactive media, local media services, online personals, real estate and financial services. ...
References - Business 2.0, August 28, 2001
- USA Today, October 1, 2001
- Various company press releases
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