Telepartner A/S announced that its newly acquired ITcom,
a leading Danish-language search engine, will be introduced in Norway and
Sweden this
fall.
The ITcom search engine and its related Webguiden will be available in
Norwegian, Swedish and English, so that Scandinavian businesses can promote
themselves internationally, the firm said.
Aldo Petersen, Telepartner’s CEO, said the company expects to enhance its
revenue potential through the addition of related Swedish and Norwegian
products
and through tie ins to
Telepartner’s existing trade catalogs.
ITcom said it believes Webguiden has certain competitive advantages over
search engines like Yahoo, Excite and Lycos, which are not offered in the
Danish language. In addition, the company claims to have the most extensive
database of businesses in Scandinavia, consisting of approximately 3.2
million up-to-date addresses, telephone numbers and fax numbers.
According to a report by domain registration firm Network Solutions, 20% of all
Scandinavians currently log on to the Internet, and numbers are expected to
grow quickly in the next few years. Scandinavia will lead Europe in on-line
penetration and will generate around $6.4 billion in online revenue by
2001, predicted a report by Forrester
Research.
Currently, the Danish site receives more than 1 million hits per week, the
company reported, and Telepartner expects similar usage in the other two
Scandinavian countries.
Separately, Telepartner further reported today that Webguiden will
introduce a newly
developed interface and significantly faster search engine this month in
Denmark. This new interface is designed to be more user friendly and
provide a broader range of information, including
financial data, on Danish businesses, Petersen said.
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