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Latino portal Quepasa.com is selling off its assets with the intention of closing down the company. News of the liquidation came just a week after Nasdaq warned the bilingual site that it faced delisting, since Quepasa shares had been trading at prices under $1 for 30 days in a row. When Quepasa announced the sale on Wednesday, trading halted at 9 cents a share. The Nasdaq warning also followed Quepasa's layoffs; in November, it fired 38 of its 58 employees. The troubles at Quepasa underscore both the general dot.com malaise and the specific failure of Latino portals to take root. Studies suggest that, at least in the U.S., the Hispanic surfers prefer English-language sites over bilingual or Spanish sites. Also, mainstream portals and ISPs like Yahoo and America Online have attracted more Hispanic web surfers than Quepasa and its ilk. Quepasa was the first site aimed at Latinos in the U.S., and in 1999, it became the second Latino-oriented portal to take its shares public.
Amazon/Toys R Us top
holiday retailer by far
How smart was it for Amazon and Toys R Us to link their web efforts?
Apparently very smart indeed. During the holiday shopping season just
ended, Amazon.com/Toysrus.com was the No. 1 e-commerce site on the web
with five times the number of shopping visits as its closest competitor.
According to new data from Nielsen//NetRatings, Americans made some 123
million shopping trips to Amazon.com/Toysrus.com between the week ending
Nov. 5 and the week ending Dec. 24. The No. 2 e-commerce site during the
holiday shopping season was eToys with 21.1 million shopping visits
recorded. And this year was truly the season of the "not.com"--Nielsen//NetRatings
reports that 11 of the top 15 e-commerce sites for the 2000 holiday season
were sites associated with offline brands, including Barnes and Noble,
Wal-Mart, J. C. Penney and Best Buy.
Priceline founder Jay
Walker takes a hike
The vice chairman and founder of "name-your-price" dot.com
Priceline.com has resigned, effective Dec. 31. Jay Walker says he will
concentrate on his role as chief executive of Walker Digital. Walker
Digital is the company that created the Priceline business model, under
which consumers name the price they’re willing to pay for tickets and
services. Walker’s departure marks the latest setback for Priceline.
Priceline fired roughly 11 percent of its staff last month and scrapped
plans to unveil new services and introduce Priceline sites in Japan and
Australia. Its stock price has declined about 97 percent over the last
year, and it has lost several top executives. Additionally, its airline
ticket sales are lackluster, and users are complaining about its service.
As a result, Priceline is in the middle of what it deems a major
restructuring that involves refocusing on airline tickets and hotel rooms
only.
E-tail
performance improved for Xmas 2000
Financial woes aside, dot.com retail sites generally provided speedier, smoother shopping experiences
this holiday season compared last year, according to a new study by
Keynote Systems. E-tail sites
posted performances ranging from 10 percent to 66 percent faster during
the season's busiest shopping week, the week following Thanksgiving,
according to Keynote. FedEx.com, Buy.com and Victoriassecret.com were the
best at keeping their online storefronts up and running in the face of
high traffic. At the other end of the spectrum, Keynote reported that a
number of major online retailers, including Bluelight.com, WalMart.com and BestBuy.com,
slowed down to half speed during Thanksgiving week. Keynote feels there is
still room for improvement as too many sites remain susceptible to traffic
slowdowns during periods of peak usage.
NetZero in patent suit
with competitor Juno
NetZero, a leading provider of free internet access, is suing its main
competitor, Juno Online Services, for patent infringement. NetZero and
Juno both offer ad-supported free web access to consumers. In exchange for
the free access, Juno and NetZero users view ads in pop-up windows,
independent of browsers and email clients, while they are online. NetZero
claims that Juno's pop-up ad windows and technology for targeting ads to
users closely mirror its own. Juno, for its part, denies that its
techniques for showing ads to users employ NetZero’s proprietary
technology. As a matter of fact, Juno had itself sued NetZero for patent
infringement back in June. While NetZero claims some 7 million registered
users, analysts believe the company has far fewer active users than Juno
and is struggling to stay alive. Juno is considered the country's No. 3
ISP behind America Online and Earthlink, with 3.7 million subscribers,
about 750,000 of whom pay $10 for a premium service that displays fewer
ads.
Internet.com buys most EarthWeb sites
In what has been deemed a "half-merger,"
high-tech content company EarthWeb has sold most of its properties to
online news and information hub Internet.com. Internet.com is buying 18
EarthWeb email newsletters and 14 web sites, including www.earthweb.com,
www.developer.com, www.HTMLgoodies.com and www.internetjournal.com.
Internet.com is hiring 46 of the EarthWeb employees who worked for the
sites being acquired. Also, EarthWeb will cut 98 of its 350 positions, and
is closing offices in Boston, San Francisco and Boulder, Colo. EarthWeb
says it now will focus on career services for technology professionals,
instead of tech support and training-oriented content. The six-year-old
company was one of the first Silicon Alley content dot.coms to go public.
The restructuring will cost EarthWeb up to $47 million for the quarter
ending Dec. 31.
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