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Internet portal/directory LookSmart has signed a deal to provide category listings for online retailer Amazon.com. Specifically, Amazon will install LookSmart’s "Subsite Listings" service for the purpose of letting consumers comb through its many merchandise categories. With the LookSmart service in place, consumers who enter a keyword to look for a particular product will be referred directly to the specific Amazon page from which they can buy the item. With an increasing number of these deals in hand LookSmart has said it expects to break even in the second quarter of this year. That goal may be furthered by deals such as this one and LookSmart’s mass firing last week of a third of its staff. LookSmart already provides a similar service for a number of major sites including MSN, AltaVista, Excite@Home and Time Warner.
Now it’s really
curtains for Pets.com
Shareholders in what’s left of pet-supplies e-tailer Pets.com have
agreed to a plan to dissolve and liquidate the company and its remaining
assets. All the company’s officers and directors resigned Wednesday.
Today, the company--renamed IPET holdings--will be delisted from the
Nasdaq Stock Market, cease recording transfers of common stock and close
its stock-transfer books. IPET is proceeding full-steam-ahead with the sale of
all its assets, which include the goofy sock puppet dog mascot from its TV
commercials. If the assets sale reaps any profits at all, the profits will
be passed out to shareholders. Diablo Management Group’s Richard G.
Couch is acting as the company’s CEO and lone director. Pets.com’s
fellow dead e-tailer, Garden.com, just drew in $4.4 million for selling
its web site content to Walmart.com; the Garden.com brand name went to
seed and gardening company W. Atlee Burpee & Co., a business now in
its 125th year.
Whitehouse.gov part of
transition
When Bill Clinton’s term as president of the United States expires at
11:59 a.m. Saturday, his administration will lose its sway over the
Whitehouse.gov domain name. President-elect George W. Bush’s team takes
it over at noon. But the Clinton version of the site will not vanish from
the historical record; it will be archived by the National Archives and
Records Administration and will remain online at www.clinton.nara.gov.
Thus, the web site will continue to exist under the Clinton Presidential
Materials Project, the forerunner of the official Clinton presidential
library that’s due to be completed in 2003 in Arkansas. The archival
service says that the web site will be the first presidential web site to
be immortalized as part of the historic record. It also happens to have
been the first-ever presidential web site.
Martha Stewart and
EthnicGrocer may team up
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and ethnic food e-tailer EthnicGrocer.com
are talking about forming a strategic alliance. The pending deal implies
that MarthaStewart.com will be beefing up its already robust e-commerce
offerings. If the deal goes through, EthnicGrocer will lease its
technology to Martha Stewart Living, which operates MarthaStewart.com and
publishes books and magazines built around homemaking advice from company
founder Martha Stewart. Chicago-based EthnicGrocer started out selling
ethnic foods online, but recently launched a business-to-business venture
called Vadia--a measure undoubtedly meant to pad its bottom line, given
the mixed success of internet-only retailers. Vadia leases out
EthnicGrocer’s logistics technology and gives licensees access to its
distribution infrastructure. EthnicGrocer runs four web sites that sell
ethnic foods, among them Namaste.com for Asian-Indian products and
QueRico.com for Latin American foods.
IVillage and Hindustan
Lever to launch web site
Women’s portal iVillage has teamed up with Hindustan Lever, a subsidiary
of consumer products giant Unilever, to create a web site for women in
India. Like iVillage’s U.S. portal, the site will have channels devoted
to health, careers, beauty, parenting, relationships, home and food. Also
like its U.S. counterpart, the site will provide planners, quizzes, chat,
message boards and other tools. Some content will also be tailored to
accommodate cultural and regional differences among the new portal’s
user base. The two companies plan to launch the site in the second half of
this year. Within five years, 40 percent of adult urban women in India are projected
to be online. Stateside, iVillage claims to have 5.7 million members,
although it has been steadily sliding downward on the Media Metrix list of
top web properties in recent months, appearing at No. 43 in December.
Britain abuzz over
internet sale of twins
Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, has condemned the apparent sale of
U.S. twins via the internet to a British couple, Alan and Judith Kilshaw.
The couple claims that they paid an online adoption agency, Caring Heart
Adoption, a $12,060 fee to have the adoption arranged over the web. The
dispute centers on the fact that Richard and Vickie Allen of
California appear to have adopted the twins first. The girls’ birth
mother, Tranda Wecker of St. Louis, told the Allens, who had cared for the
girls for two months at that point, that she wanted a couple of days to
see the girls again one last time. She used the time to hand the children
to the Kilshaws in a San Diego hotel. The Kilshaws at that point traveled
to Arkansas to take advantage of its loose adoption laws, and hightailed
it home to Flintshire in North Wales. Prime Minister Blair’s spokesman
decries the fact that children can be bought and sold as a commodity over
the internet.
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