Excite
Excite is an Internet portal with an included search engine. It is one of the most recognized brands on the Internet. Excite belongs to the Ask Jeeves network. Excite offers a variety of services, including web-mail, stock quotes, and a customizable user homepage. The news and other content on the portal is provided by over 100 different providers.
Excite was founded as Architext in 1994 by Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch, Joe Kraus, Graham Spencer, and Martin Reinfried. The founders were all students in computer science (except for Kraus, who was a political science major) at Stanford University. They managed to get a $4000 investment from Institutional Venture Partners to start the company. It took another year, until December 1995, to launch Excite on the web.
In 1996, the company bought two search engines, Magellan and WebCrawler, and went public with an initial offering of two million shares priced at $17 USD. It gained exclusive distribution agreements with companies such as Netscape, Microsoft and Apple Computer.
In 1999, Excite combined with high-speed Internet service @Home.com and became Excite@Home, but the $6.7 billion merger fell disastrously short of expectations. Among the problems, there was a culture clash between the people from Excite, who viewed themselves as pioneers in the New Economy, and the older, more traditional employees from @Home. The burst of the dot-com bubble in March of 2000 further limited the company's prospects. By 2001, there was tension among major investors and the company was starting to run out of cash.
Excite@Home filed for bankruptcy in October of 2001. During bankruptcy proceedings, it sold the Excite.com domain to sweepstakes-based portal iWon for $10 million USD, and Blue Mountain Arts, which it had acquired for almost $1 billion USD, to American Greetings for $35 million USD. Outside of the United States, Excite Italia took control of portals in Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Austria.
iWon changed it's corporate name to the Excite Network, and rebuilt an entirely new Excite web portal as it had not acquired any technology or employees in the bankruptcy proceedings. It continued to operate Excite, in addition to iWon and a third portal, MyWay, until the company was acquired by Ask Jeeves in 2004. Excite Italia continues to operate sites under the Excite brand outside of the United States.
