InfoSpace.com Inc, the Seattle, Washington supplier of White and Yellow Pages directories, news and maps to internet portals, has signed a deal with e-commerce telecom services Talk.com Inc. Under the deal, InfoSpace will integrate its directory information into Reston, Virginia-based Talk.com’s real-time online billing software. Talk.com claims to be the largest supplier of e-commerce telecom services in the US, and has set up e-commerce relationships with 1.2 million registered internet accounts through marketing relationships with internet service providers.
InfoSpace last week posted second-quarter loss of $5.0m on revenue up 266% at $6.73m, but said that excluding acquisition related charges, net income would have been $409,000. It claims to have reached operating profits two quarters ahead of analyst expectations, mainly through the growth of its ActiveShopper end- to-end integrated shopping service. ActiveShopper was launched in May on 700 sites, including the DoubleClick Network, Lycos, Xoom.com, Microsoft Media Player, Wall Street Journal and go2net sites. Last year in its second quarter, InfoSeek posted a loss of $2.7m on revenue of $1.84m.
Investing heavily, InfoSpace also has deals with America Online Inc and Lycos Inc to provide classified advertising services, and on June 30, acquired instant messaging technology from its neighbor Active Voice Inc for $18m. The technology, currently named MyAgent, will form the basis of integrated instant messaging, desktop portal, myinfo and calender and chat services from InfoSeek, to be launched in the future.
ActiveVoice, a PC-based voice processing systems and computer telephony integration company, says it developed MyAgent as a by- product of its Unity messaging server efforts, and retains the rights to expand the technology and merge it back into Unity in the future. InfoSpace says it is looking for further acquisitions.
