iWon.com Integrates Excite Features into Site
iWon.com, a popular Web site that attracts traffic by awarding daily jackpots, is poised to cash in on its recent takeover of Excite.com, a multipurpose online service salvaged from one of the Internet's biggest bankruptcies.
The transition to a new era in Excite.com's six-year history is essentially complete, iWon.com said Thursday. Virtually all of the old Excite.com features, including stock quotes, movie listings and news reports, have been recreated by a team of 110 iWon.com engineers who worked on the project since early October, the Irvington, N.Y., company said.
The final phase of the changeover occurred between mid-December and New Year's Day as iWon.com transferred between 250 million and 400 million e-mails stored for Excite's registered users to new computers. Excite, founded in 1995 just as the Web began to attract a mass audience, became available as part of the September bankruptcy of its former parent, Redwood City-based ExciteAtHome, which operated the nation's biggest cable network for Internet access.
iWon.com acquired the rights to Excite through Bellevue, Wash.-based InfoSpace Inc., which bought the Web site last month for $10 million, a staggering discount from the portal's $6.7 billion price in 1999. With the addition of Excite, iWon will manage an online network that ranks among the most popular on the Web, based on November ratings complied by Jupiter Media Metrix, an online research firm.
Oracle Sacking 850 Workers
Coming off its toughest quarter in a decade, business software giant Oracle Corp. said Friday that it will fire up to 850 employees, or 2 percent of its worldwide work force, early next year to help offset sluggish sales.
The layoffs will be concentrated in Oracle's North American consulting arm as well as its divisions that sell software to government, education and health care markets, according to a company statement.
Redwood Shores-based Oracle estimates that 1 to 2 percent of its 42,433 employees will lose their jobs.
AOL Rejects Harvard E-mails
Dozens of e-mail messages telling Harvard University applicants whether they had been admitted to the university never arrived last month after America Online interpreted the messages as junk e-mail.
"This wasn't exactly the instant response we intended,'' William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions and financial aid, told The Boston Globe.
After anthrax spores were mailed through the U.S. postal system, Harvard began using e-mail to inform applicants of whether they had been rejected or accepted. E-mail was used to notify almost all of the 6,000 students who applied in the school's early admission process.
But for reasons that even AOL could not explain, the service blocked between 75 and 100 of the e-mails in December because the servers flagged the messages as "spam,'' the unwanted e-mails that clog users' mailboxes. The messages were bounced back to the university.
Hynix Raises Price on Chips
South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor Inc., the world's third-largest memory chipmaker, has raised prices for its long-term customers for the third time in a month.
The debt-ridden company said the 30 percent price increase and other recent hikes are aimed at narrowing the gap between prices for chips sold by long-term contracts and those sold immediately on the market.
Hynix has been in deep financial trouble and has debts of more than $6 billion. It lost nearly $3 billion in the first nine months of 2001 as global prices for semiconductor chips fell. Analysts said the price hikes would help ease the company's financial difficulties, but any benefits would be short-lived without a continued recovery of global demand for memory chips. Hynix's latest price increase, completed Tuesday, was the third since early December. Its prices had previously gone up by 10 to 20 percent.
drkoop.com Folds
Troubled Internet company drkoop.com Inc. closed its Web site last week and will liquidate its assets. The site, started in Austin, Texas, in 1997 by former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and others, had hoped to find new financing but will instead declare bankruptcy.
The company said it will ask a court-appointed trustee to sell its assets to satisfy its creditors. Shareholders, who have seen the value of the stock plunge from $45 soon after the company went public to pennies per share before it was delisted earlier this year, will likely not receive anything, the company said.
In July, the company agreed to pay $4.25 million in cash to settle lawsuits filed by investors who claimed drkoop.com made false promises. The high-profile failure leaves WebMd and Medscape as the major online health information sites on the Web.
Priceline.com Teams up with AOL
Priceline.com, the name-your-own-price Internet company, entered into a travel marketing alliance with America Online Inc. Priceline's travel products will be promoted throughout AOL's Travel Channel, as well as travel and related areas on CompuServe, Netscape and MapQuest.
That will allow the tens of millions of users of the America Online, Inc. brands to make offers on airline tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars and vacation packages sold by Priceline.com, the company said. Priceline said the agreement aligns the Norwalk-based company with its first major online marketing partner to complement radio and TV advertising campaigns.
Dutch Product Gives Radio New Channel
Royal Philips Electronics NV, the Dutch electronics giant, is working on a product that could solve the problems of music lovers worldwide who hear a song on the radio but miss the name of the tune.
The company has developed Audio Fingerprinting, which it will start selling licenses for by the end of the year.
The technology allows users to retrieve, within seconds, not only a track's title but also the artist and album name. All that is required is of the user is to hold a mobile phone to a radio's speaker for three seconds--long enough to record a digital fingerprint--when a song is playing.
The cell phone sends the fingerprint to a database that matches it with the identifying codes of almost every song ever recorded and released. Less than four seconds after dialing the service number, up pops a text message on the cell phone with the song's title. Microsoft Corp. and other companies are developing similar technology.
Philips researchers say background noise and poor sound quality should not prevent the server from recognizing a song.
Free ISP in Europe Files for Bankruptcy
The future of Austrian-based Kiwwi CEE Holding's Hungarian subsidiary has come under intense scrutiny recently. The company, known throughout Central Europe for its free dial-up Internet access, has filed for bankruptcy protection as one of its investors failed to give further financial support.
Kiwwi provides both VoIP services for companies and free dial-up Internet access for consumers in Hungary. The VoIP service is the most profitable in Hungary. However, the free Internet access division has made only losses during its one-year history and advertising revenues have not reached initial estimates. Kiwwi CEE also has operations in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia.