Zapata Corp. closed out a busy week with the announcement today that its ZAP Corp. Internet subsidiary signed an agreement to acquire CoolChat, Inc., a Web community that boasts 300,000 members.
The announcement comes on the heels of a hectic few days for Zapata which
unveiled plans on Monday to purchase or invest in more than 20 other Internet sites and e-commerce businesses to grow its ZAP.com Internet portal.
President and CEO Avram Glazer said in a television interview this week that the acquisition-based strategy was aimed at turning ZAP.com into one of the leading Internet portals. The company’s (NASDAQ: ZAP) stock surged this week on the news as Wall Street’s love affair with Internet-based businesses continues.
With the CoolChat acquisition ZAP.com will add online chat rooms, personal advertisements, free home pages, threaded conference forums and message boxes. Earlier this week the company also acquired ChatPlanet, a Java chat network.
Zapata said CoolChat is ranked as one of the top chatroom sites on the Web according to 100hot.com,
and the site is included in Webcrawler’s top 10 chatrooms list.
Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed.