Lycos Acquires Community Builder

Lycos Inc. moved to expand its community offerings
Tuesday with its purchase of Valent Software for $45 million in stock.

Specific financial details were not disclosed.

Valent’s NetClubs, used to put community functions on a Web site, are already used across Lycos’ (LCOS) network . It lets users link to online clubs that meet their interest.

During the past six months, Lycos Clubs has experienced more than a 500
percent increase in page views and user registrations and has grown from
7,800 clubs to more than 62,000. Lycos Clubs connected its members by adding
integrated communication tools that facilitate interaction among the
members.

“Now we are focused on tightly integrating all of our community and
communications services products to enable our users to interact — ‘talk
about it’ — no matter where they are or what they’re doing on our network
of Web sites,” said Don Zereski, vice president of community and
communications for Lycos. “The goal is to seamlessly link our properties in
a way that encourages users to visit every day to check mail, chat with
friends and update their homepage.”

Lycos offers a little piece of everything to keep its clients coming,
including chat rooms, clubs, message boards, instant messenger services and
home page publishing tools vis-a-vis the technology of Tripod and Angelfire.

In related news, Lycos Monday agreed to create a co-branded version of Mambo.com’s online invitation and payment
service. The site, located here,
will enable the Lycos Network to plan and coordinate all types of activities
and events within its community.