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 40 countries. Lycos
was sold to
Terra Networks of Spain
in May 2000 for $13 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; 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 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 [2698], a
Lycos property providing free webhosting, blogging and web
publishing tools
- Gamesville [2699],
Lycos's massive multiplayer gaming site
- Hotbot [2700], a Lycos-owned search engine
- HtmlGear [2701], a Lycos property providing web-page addons
(guestbooks, etc.)
- Tripod.com [2702], a Lycos
property providing free webhosting, blogging and web publishing
tools
- Webon [2703], a next generation webhosting and publishing
platform
- WhoWhere.com [2704], a people search engine
Lycos-branded sites
- Lycos Domains [2705], Internet domain
name purchasing
- Lycos Mail [2706], a email provider formerly known as
Mailcity.com.
- Lycos Planet [2707], Lycos social networking and light web-building
site. It is the successor to Lycos
Circles, which was shut down in September 2005.
- Lycos Retriever [2708], an automatically generated information
summarization service.
- Lycos Cinema [2709], an online video and social networking site.
(This service closed on April 29 2009.)
- Lycos MIX [2710], a video playlist chat and social networking
site.
Former Lycos sites
References
External links
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