Posts Tagged ‘lycos’
Lycos To Relaunch Search Services In Europe, For Whatever Reason
Remember Lycos? Well, believe it or not, they’re not dead yet. In fact, the search engine / web portal has just announced that it has regained the rights to use its the trademarked brand names “Lycos” and “Hotbot” within the European territory. In case that confuses you: Lycos Europe had an exclusive license to use those terms within Europe under an agreement dating back to 1997 when the company was formed as part of a joint venture and started up European operations independently from Lycos.
In a statement Jungwook Lim, CEO of Lycos (which today is actually a subsidiary to Korean Internet giant Daum Communications), said: “Lycos continues to have a loyal user base and we expect this consolidation to help revitalize and strengthen our search businesses within Europe.” That made me scratch my head a bit, because I’ve been living and working in Europe for a long time and I don’t know a living soul that’s still ‘loyal’ to anything remotely Lycos.
Chuckle along with this additional statement from Edward Noel, General Manager of Search and Business Development for Lycos, too:
“Over the next several weeks Lycos will be re-launching the provision of search services within the European territory. Locally targeted content verticals will gradually be rolled out and we will be taking steps to enhance our users’ search experience.”
If I read that correctly, it seems Lycos is not giving up on Europe just yet.
Too bad European users have long given up on them.
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More Bad News: The Curtains Close On Lycos Cinema
It’s been a bad day for the Internet’s old guard. This morning we reported that Yahoo was pulling the plug on Geocities. Now we’ve learned that Lycos Cinema, one of the social media projects created by the once-massively popular web portal, is closing its doors. Granted, Lycos has been under new ownership for years and has been trying to get a foothold in markets unrelated to the web portal/search engine that made its famous, but it’s still a name many of us associate with the late 90’s, when it was among the most trafficked sites in the world.
Lycos Cinema launched over two years ago, with the promise of letting friends watch videos from different computers at the same time using ’simulstream’ technology, which was supposed to mimic the social experience of watching a movie in a movie theatre or over at a friend’s house. The site got a big upgrade last May, when it launched a new chat client and a revamped interface.
Unfortunately, it looks like Lycos Cinema never got over its biggest obstacle: a lack of content. We wrote last year that the site hadn’t signed any of the major studios, and by the looks of the current library this never changed. The only studio listed is ‘National Lampoon’, and I can honestly say that I haven’t heard of 90% of the movies featured on the site’s homepage. That may have flown a few years ago, but with sites like Hulu and TV.com offering recent movies and TV shows, there just wasn’t much of a reason to head to Lycos Cinema.
According to the notice at the top of the site, Lycos Cinema will close on April 29th.
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Apple’s App Store: 1 Billion Served
Well, it finally happened. Apple just delivered its 1 Billionth application download from the App Store, which currently features over 25,000 apps (35,000 by one estimate) built by thousands of developers. The significance of the milestone (besides just the 1 billion mark) is that it’s taken only nine months from when the App Store launched on iTunes to hit 1 billion paid and unpaid downloads.
Last summer, Apple sold one million 3G iPhones worldwide across 21 countries in the first 3 days on sale. During that same time, iPhone users made 10 million app downloads from the then newly launched iTunes App Store.
The count was at 300 million in early December, and the App Store hit 500 million downloads by January 16th. It took Apple six months to reach the first 500 million downloads. It would take Apple only three months to get another 500 billion downloads. By March, 2009, it was at 800 million. We started keeping track via Apple’s billion-app countdown at around 928,077,779. Apple also offered us a fleeting glimpse of the most popular apps ever, something the company only did once before.
Apple apparently already had a hunch of when the billion mark was going to be passed, because the billionth app celebration page was already ready to go.
Apple predicted the time when the billionth app would be downloaded: 1:24:06 AM PST on April 23. That didn’t happen.
The number of different apps available has also been growing steadily. In November, the app store had 10,000 apps, and grew to 15,000 by Apple’s quarterly earnings call in January. Within a month, the app store added 5,000 more apps, bringing the total available apps up to 20,000. By March, the app store has over 25,000 apps. Now, according to an estimate by App Store analytics firm Mobclix, there are 35.550 apps worldwide.
Some lucky iPhone user who downloaded an app in the past two weeks will win a $10,000 iTunes gift card, MacBook Pro, Time Capsule, and iPod touch. We also hosted our own contest to see who could guess when the billionth app would be downloaded and we will release the results soon.
Here’s a current list of the top apps, free and paid, downloaded, courtesy of Mobclix. The numbers next to the global stats indicate how many countries had that app ranked as #1.:
Top 5 free (Global):
1: Heat Pad - Relaxing Heat Sensitive Surface (17)
2: Skype (9)
3: Ferrari GT Evolution: Lite Version (6)
4: Racing Live (4)
5: Yahoo! Messenger (4)
Top 5 paid (Global):
1: Camera Zoom (12)
2: Flight Control (11)
3: Playman Track & Field (3)
4: Wild West Pinball (2)
5: Airport Mania: First Flight (2)
Top 5 free (US):
1: Catcha Mouse
2: iDare
3: F-MyLife
4: Heat Pad - Relaxing Heat Sensitive Surface
5: Dictionary.com
Top 5 paid (US):
1: Flight Control
2: StickWars - Siege
3: Pocket God
4: iHunt 3D
5: ParkingLot
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