Excite (spelled as 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. (outside USA only), 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.^[1]

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; owned by IAC Search and Media.

In the 1990s, Excite was one of the most recognized brands on the Internet.

History[link]

Early years[link]

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$100,000 to develop an online service. In January 1995, Vinod Khosla (a former Stanford student), 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 (CEO). Excite also purchased two search engines (Magellan and WebCrawler) and signed exclusive distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, in addition to other companies.

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 only had enough available capital to meet obligations through December.^[2] 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".^[3]

Excite@Home[link]

Excite@Home headquarters for sale

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.^{[citation needed]} The new company was named "Excite@Home" (the stock symbol and the company's name in regulatory filing records remained as "At Home Corporation" (ATHM)) 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. @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[link]

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[link]

Excite continued to operate until the Excite Network was acquired by Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) 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 InterActive Corporation, 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 (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.^[4]

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. (the operator of Excite Europe), 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.^[5]

Other services[link]

FreeLane by Excite[link]

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.^[6]

Excite Tickets Portal[link]

Excite.com features a number of domains that cater to different services. Their events^[7] 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 Degrees Portal[link]

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 Degrees^[8] portal features a list of thousands of educational institutes across America for prospective students to browse through and apply at.

International[link]

Local Excite websites:

The United States version does not apply as it is a personal portal, called My Excite.

See also[link]

• List of search engines

References[link]

External links[link]

• Excite France
• Excite Germany
• Excite Italy
• Excite Japan
• Excite Netherlands
• Excite Poland
• Excite Spain
• Excite Switzerland (in German)
• Excite UK
• My Excite (US)
• Excite Search