Terra Lycos Wednesday moved to expand its Lycos Anywhere initiative with the launch of a Spanish and English WAP portal at http://wap.terra.com. The portal is a sister to the company’s English language WAP portal http://wap.lycos.com, launched earlier this year.
The company said the portal is the first to offer wireless users email, search, directory, news, sports results and weather in both Spanish and English.
Terra Lycos said the portal “targets the exploding market for wireless Internet devices in the U.S., including Internet-enabled WAP phones and a large number of hand-held devices and personal digital assistants.”
The new WAP portal, together with the existing English language portal, opens the way for wireless users to access a multilingual search catalog of more than 2 million WAP-enables pages, according to the company. The Terra and Lycos WAP search was developed by FAST Search and Transfer of Norway, and Terra Lycos said the service also provides users with access to a customized, bilingual directory of U.S. WAP sites organized by relevance and selected by editors at Pinpoint.
“Terra Lycos is uniquely able to deploy new products in multiple languages drawing on the resources of our constituent organizations around the world,” said Joaquim Agut, executive chairman of Terra Lycos. “Mobile applications, such as our new WAP search and email, are a great example of the tremendous synergies of the Terra and Lycos Networks that enable us to roll out these functions more rapidly and to offer a greater experience to our users and advertisers.”
Ron Sege, president of U.S. operations for Terra Lycos, promised that the company would maintain its edge in development of wireless product offerings.
Such is not the case with free Internet access. Last month, Lycos Inc. quietly pulled the plug on its free Internet access service, citing the close of operations of its free Internet access provider, 1stUp Corp.
1stUp, a CMGi company, closed its doors on Dec. 10. To help customers make the transition, Lycos secured a special offer with PeoplePC for a discount rate of $9.95 per month with a one year subscription.