Infoseek Corp has signed an agreement to buy e-commerce company Quando Inc for $17m in Infoseek common stock. Quando is a kind of commercial agent; its software crawls the web in order to assemble contact and shopping directories, event guides, audio clip libraries and so forth. The technology is integrated with certain desktop applications, so users can drag and drop events from the Quando directory straight into Microsoft Outlook and Eudora Planner. Infoseek plans to introduce shopping and local event guides to its portal before the end of 1998. Of course it could have done that without actually buying Quando, but the acquisition reflects the increasing importance of interactive shopping to portal sites’ bottom lines. It’s one thing to have astronomical hit rates as users move through a portal on their way to somewhere else, but it’s quite another to serve up carefully targeted potential buyers to advertisers. Buying guides may not be what people think of as content. For a start, they tend to be dull – but they certainly move ads, and that in turn moves companies. Only last week, Amazon Inc bought shopping database vendor Junglee Corp while television network NBC took a 6% stake in would-be shopping network Intertainer (CI No 3,467). For its part, Infoseek is now 43% owned by the Walt Disney Co and presumably trying to account to its part-parent for lower access figures in the second quarter (CI No 3,459). If Infoseek builds a net mall, will the mall rats come?
