Excite Inc, best known for its internet search engine, continues to re-invent itself by acquisition and has now spent some $89m to acquire MatchLogic Inc, a Louisville Colorado-based start-up barely a year old, for approximately 3.2 million shares of Excite stock. Matchlogic is an online advertising management services firm which specializes in direct marketing, an area which takes Excite beyond its traditional consumer focus to advertising campaign management. Excite believes it’s spotted a trend towards direct marketing on the web, for which it needs information databases, targeting and reporting technology, and database expertise. Despite its youth, Matchlogic claims to have 100 cumulated years worth of experience of direct marketing and advertising on its payroll, culled from staff who left companies such as EDS Corp, Polk, National Demographics and Neodata Services Inc. President and chief executive officer Pete Estler was the founder of dbIntellect Technologies, the Golden, Colorado-based database marketing company now a division of EDS Corp. In its short life Matchlogic has grown fast, from 12 to 112 staff and from one to five data centers in the course of last year, and was expecting to reach profitability in the third quarter of this year. It now claims to have up to 500 million advertising impressions spread over thousands of web sites. Its job is to schedule and distribute advertisements across web sites for large advertisers such as General Motors, hosting ads and collecting the response on its own five data center sites in the US and Europe, based around hardware from Sun Microsystems Inc. Responses are collected using its own TrueCount advertising response measurement tool, and Matchlogic also has its own set of data analysis tools, which takes it towards data warehousing territory. Estler will remain chief executive of the company, which he will run from Colorado as an independent subsidiary. He hopes to take advantage of Excite’s consumer customer base, its data centers, and its indexing and keyword processing software technology. Analysts have upped their expectations of Excite’s revenues next year from $80m up to $100m on news of the deal.
