Excite is a collection of web sites and services, launched in December 1995.
Excite is an online service offering a variety of content, including an
Internet portal showing news and weather etc., a search engine, a web-based
email, instant messaging, stock quotes, and a customizable user homepage. The
content is collated from over 100 different sources.
Excite's portal and services are owned by Excite Networks, but in the USA,
Excite is a personal portal, called My Excite, which is operated by Mindspark
and owned by IAC Search and Media. In the 1990s, Excite was one of the most
recognized brands on the Internet. History
= Early years = Excite was founded as Architext in 1994
by Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch and
Martin Reinfried, who were all students at Stanford University. In July 1994,
International Data Group paid them USD$80,000 to develop an online service.
In January 1995, Vinod Khosla, a partner at the venture capital firm, Kleiner
Perkins Caufield & Byers, arranged a USD$250,000 "first round" backing for
the project, with USD$1.5 million provided over a ten-month period. Soon
thereafter, Geoff Yang, of Institutional Venture Partners, introduced an
additional USD$1.5 million in financing and Excite was formally launched in
December 1995. In January 1996, George Bell joined Excite as its Chief
Executive Officer. Excite also purchased two search engines and signed exclusive
distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, in addition to
other companies. In 1994, Excite hired Jim Bellows, then 72, to figure out how
to present the content in a journalistic manner. He paid good journalists to
write brief reviews of web sites. However, users wanted to get directly to
the content and skipped the reviews, so the partnership with Bellows ended in
1998. On April 4, 1996, Excite went public
with an initial offering of two million shares. In June 1997, Intuit, maker of
Quicken and TurboTax, purchased a 19% stake in Excite and finalized a
seven-year partnership deal. On October 16, 1997, Excite purchased Netbot, a
comparison shopping agent. At the same time Intuit announced the launch of
Excite Business & Investing. Later that year a deal was finalized with
Ticketmaster to provide direct online ticketing. On March 31, 1998, Excite
reported a net loss of approximately $30.2 million and according to its first
quarter report it had only enough available capital to meet obligations
through December. In December 1998, Yahoo! was in negotiations to purchase
Excite for $5.5 billion to $6 billion. However, prompted by Kleiner Perkins,
@Home Network's Chairman and CEO, Thomas Jermoluk met with Excite’s chairman and
CEO George Bell on December 19, and Excite was subsequently acquired by
@Home Network, on January 19, 1999. According to Justin Rohrlich, writing
for Minyanville.com, later in 1999, two graduate students at Stanford
University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, decided that Google, the search engine
they had developed, was taking up time they should have been using to study.
They went to Bell and offered it to him for $1 million, but Bell rejected the
offer, and later threw Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, out of
his office after he had negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000. Excite's
refusal to buy what became a $180 billion company by 2010 was labeled by
Rohrlich a "stupid business decision". = Excite@Home =
The USD$6.7 billion merger of Excite and @Home Network in 1999 became one of the
largest mergers of two Internet companies at the time. @Home's
high-speed Internet services and existing portal were combined with
Excite's search engine and portal, with a move towards personalized web portal
content following the merger. The new company was named "Excite@Home") and,
six months after the merger, Tom Jermoluk stepped down as CEO of
Excite@Home. Excite’s George Bell, who was the President of the Excite division
of @Home after the merger, became the new CEO of the combined Excite@Home,
whilst Jermoluk remained Chairman of the Board.
Following the merger, the Excite division purchased iMall, as well as
online greeting card company, Blue Mountain Arts. Excite also acquired
photo sharing company Webshots. Excite furthermore paid for sponsorship of
Infiniti Indy car driver Eddie Cheever, Jr., through the 2000 and 2001 racing
seasons. However, the merger between Excite and @Home fell disastrously short
of expectations. Online advertising revenue plummeted, while cable network
ISP revenue continued to grow. On September 21, 2000, after stock value
had dropped 90%, George Bell announced plans to step down as CEO within six
months. On April 23, 2001, Excite@Home announced Patti S. Hart, the former CEO
of Telocity, would become its third CEO in three years. In the same
announcement, George Bell resigned and left the company completely. The company
also reported first-quarter net loss of $61.6 million, compared with a loss of
$4.6 million in the same period the prior year.
On June 11, 2001, Excite@Home announced that it had raised $100 million in
financing from Promethean Capital Management and Angelo Gordon & Co. Part
of the deal was that the loan was repayable immediately if Excite@Home
stock was delisted by NASDAQ. The loan, structured as a note convertible into
shares of Excite, had an interest rate of zero. By August 20 of that year,
Excite@Home had replaced its auditors Ernst & Young with
PricewaterhouseCoopers. This triggered a demand from Promethean Capital
Management and Angelo Gordon & Co for the immediate repayment of $50 million
in debt. Furthermore, Cox Cable and Comcast announced that they would
separate from Excite@Home by the first quarter of 2002.
On September 13, 2001, Excite@Home sold Blue Mountain Arts to American Greetings
for less than 5% of what it had paid less than two years earlier. On October
1, 2001, Excite@Home filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with the U.S.
Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California. The company's
remaining 1,350 employees were laid off over the following months. As part of
the agreement, @Home's national high-speed fiber network access would be
sold back to AT&T Corporation. @Home Liquidating Trust became the successor
company to Excite@Home, charged with the sale of all assets of the former
company. At the end of 2001, the Webshots assets
were purchased by the company's founders for $2.4 million in cash from the
Bankruptcy Court. = Excite Network =
During the collapse of Excite@Home, iWon.com, an Irvington, New York–based
venture, had surreptitiously commenced the design of a new Excite website;
iWon.com planned to acquire the Excite.com domain name and brand in the
course of the bankruptcy proceedings. IWon.com eventually made a joint bid
with Seattle's InfoSpace to purchase the domain name and brand. On November 28,
2001, the court accepted the bid and gave iWon less than three weeks to
launch a new Excite portal. Bill Daugherty, iWon's founder and co-chief
executive at the time, told The New York Times, "I feel like a guy who lived
through a hurricane, got pounded and pounded and managed to survive when
everyone else was destroyed. Suddenly you walk outside and because of the
storm you have beachfront property. That's what Excite is to us."
On December 16, 2001, iWon launched the new Excite portal and transferred
millions of Excite users to its new home. iWon changed its corporate name to
Excite Network, and continued to operate Excite, iWon, and a third portal, MyWay.
Outside of the United States, Excite Italia took control of portals in UK,
Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, and
Austria. Infospace, for its part, owned and operated the web search function on
Excite. This proved to be a short-sighted arrangement as searching
became big business on the Internet in the ensuing years.
= Acquisition by Ask Jeeves = Excite continued to operate until the
Excite Network was acquired by Ask Jeeves in March 2004. Ask Jeeves
promised to rejuvenate iWon and Excite, but did not. 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 merger with
Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, announced in March 2005. "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 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 the rejuvenation of the Excite brand. It first announced
that it had acquired Excite Italia B.V., from Tiscali, S.p.A.; and, secondly, the
company reported that it had reached a comprehensive settlement with InfoSpace
regarding Excite in the United States, whereby Ask Jeeves and InfoSpace would
share marketing costs and revenue from the Excite web search function.
Regarding the acquisition, Ask Jeeves CEO, Steve Berkowitz, said, "We look
forward to working with InfoSpace to enhance the search experience on Excite,
now that our interests are aligned." On October 17, 2007, GOADV, a media company
specializing in the generation of Internet "traffic", announced the
completion of its acquisition of the European Excite group of companies.
Other services = FreeLane by Excite =
In a bid to compete against Internet Service Providers like NetZero and Juno
Online, which offered free or low-cost dial-up access in the United States,
Excite started offering its own "no-pay" service for private customers by
partnering with 1stUp.com to create FreeLane by Excite: 1stUp would allow
Excite customers to download software in order for them to be able log-on to the
Internet. The software would then rotate a series of sponsored banner
advertisements on the user's computer while they surfed the Internet.
1stUp.com soon went out of business, and Excite switched to another partner named
WorldShare, rebranding FreeLane as FreeLane version 2.0. As of March 1,
2001 FreeLane was discontinued. = Excite Tickets Portal =
Excite.com features a number of domains that cater to different services. Their
events portal is essentially a ticket selling website where users can buy
tickets and search through thousands of events and venues. The powerful search
engine capabilities of the Excite server are utilized on this website to help the
user search for tickets and events. = Excite Education Portal =
Recently Excite.com has also started an education portal that can be used by
people to search for and apply for different degrees and online courses.
The Excite Education portal features a list of thousands of educational
institutes across America for prospective students to browse through
and apply at. International
Local Excite websites: The United States version does not apply
as it is a personal portal, called My Excite.
See also List of search engines
References External links
Excite France Excite Germany
Excite Italy Excite Japan
Excite Netherlands Excite Poland
Excite Spain Excite UK
My Excite Excite Search