Also, the Web guide site signed an agreement with Schwab and Quicken.com
to pump up its investment area. And Excite turned on the lights at its new
express shopping service, with an aim to grab a big piece of the holiday
shopping frenzy. Taken together, the news puts Excite on track for e-tail and
investing.
GeoCities (NASDAQ:GCTY) comes in second this week, with its $31
million agreement to acquire Webring ($29M stock, $2M cash). Webring is
what we call a user-perpetuated community based on topics. For example,
football fans who want to share links between respective sites and who want
to interact among themselves.
We poked over Webring a while ago and think
its concept shows promise and fits with GeoCities’ community model well.
There’s still some work to be done on its business model we suspect,
however.
Netscape.com (NASDAQ:NSCP) wins the award for most interesting deal of the
week: a $95 million stock buy of AtWeb, a Web service aimed at helping
small businesses get on and manage Web sites.
That move follows
Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) $250 million stock deal for ad-network for small
businesses LinkExchange. Lest anyone forget, small business comprise 90% of
all businesses, and there are more than 10 million of them in the U.S.
alone. How’s this for a possible sleeper off the radar, Go2Net
(NASDAQ:GNET) which recently acquired Hypermart, a Web service that hosts
small business sites for free. 100,000 of them. It also owns and runs the
very popular Silicon Investor message boards.
roundup!
