InfoSpace

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Infospace Inc., founded by Naveen Jain, is a mobile entertainment provider, a private label search engine and an online directory^[1]. The company has two divisions, Infospace Mobile, and Infospace Search & Directory. They provide the WAP portal as well as ringtones, wallpapers, games and mobile search features for many US cellular carriers. InfoSpace's branded search sites include Dogpile, WebCrawler, MetaCrawler, Zip2, Zoo.com and WebFetch. Switchboard was acquired by InfoSpace, Inc. in June 2004.

[edit] History

InfoSpace was founded in March 1996 by Naveen Jain after he left Microsoft as a senior executive of MSN. The company, starting with only six employees, built an online yellow pages service to be funded through advertising. Naveen Jain stayed on as its CEO until December 2002, when he left to start online information commerce company Intelius.

Infospace went public on December 15, 1998 closing up $5 at $20 a share (ticker INSP). The company raised $75 million in the offering.^[2]

Infospace stock price, which reached $1,305 in march 2000^[3], crashed down to just $2.67 by June 2002.^[4]. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen lost an estimated $400 million during the share price collapse.^[4]

Also in 2000, Infospace used a controversial accounting method to report $46 million in profits when in fact it had lost $282 million according to the SEC.^[5]

In 2003, InfoSpace acquired Moviso^[6] from Vivendi Universal Net USA. Moviso provides ringtones, wallpapers, and video games, usually accessed through a mobile handset enabling wireless carriers to charge a fee for these downloads.

In 2004, InfoSpace moved into the mobile games space acquiring Atlas Mobile, IOMO and elkware. ^[7]

September 2006 InfoSpace released news^[8] that a carrier partner would be working directly with major recording labels thus negatively impacting their core business.

Following this carrier/label arrangement, InfoSpace sold the Moviso mobile content business to FunMobility, Atlas Mobile studio to Twistbox ^[9] and IOMO re-emerged as FinBlade^[10]; remaining portions of InfoSpace Mobile were acquired by Motricity in December of 2007.

InfoSpace was trading at $18.31 as of October 2007.