Lycos Europe was founded in 1997 when Lycos signed a joint venture agreement with German group Bertelsmann. Two years later (1999) they opened branches in several cities. In Spain, a delegation was opened that was run by Oscar Sanchez for 4 years, now General Manager for Tech Sales Group. Bertelsmann group was the content leader in Europe after merging with Lycos - one out of 3 Europeans was a Lycos Europe user. They were overwhelmingly successful and it went public at 24€. In May 2000, Lycos is bought by Terra Networks (Telefonica) for $12500. They start buying strategically in Europe. They buy, among others, Swedish ISP Tiscali for 13 million Euros in August 2004, or Spray Network (8 portals in European countries) for 674 million Euros in September 2000, increasing the number of registered users to 8.5 million and 19 million visited pages. Those were years of incredible success, but the dotcom crisis and bad management brought about its debacle. At the beginning of 2004, Lycos lays off 100 workers in Europe, leaving 825. In 2005 half of the Spanish staff is laid off. They also offered them to move to other countries, especially Germany. On the other hand, 34 IT people in France (out of ...

Google’s virtual world platform, Lively, will foreclose on the 31st of December. This was announced by Google on their blog. Lively was launched by Google in July 2008, a mere four months ago. Apparently time enough to realise the service doesn’t work. Lively is a virtual world platform where users can create their own incarnations and personalised rooms with several tools, that are free to try, and publish them on websites with an HTML code inlay. Users communicated with each other by entering and gathering in the rooms of others, these, like any other chat room, could be public or private. They could even be decorated collectively. Following the launch, everyone found similarities with Second Life (which isn’t precisely going through a good patch), but the truth is that any similarity with SL ended when you left a room as it didn’t allow you to wander around a complete virtual world, the way to move from one room to another was by surfing Lively’s website and selecting one from a list. Another attempt by Google to take part in something slightly successful. In this case, they competed clearly with Second Life, which as I said, stopped being news months ago. I have read articles that speak ...

Microsoft announced yesterday that they will close the MSN Groups service. In an e-mail sent by Microsoft to groups administrators, it gives them the option to migrate their communities to a service of similar features, developed by Multiply for this purpose. The total closure of the service will take place on February 21st 2009. According to Microsoft, this hasn't been an easy decision. The reason of the closure is the new development of Live Groups, which will be launched on November 17th. But why don't they wait for the development of this new service to be completed, and then migrate users? According to Microsoft, it doesn't make sense because of the irreconcilable differences between both services, differences that make impossible a migration. I can't understand it because, from my point of view, everything is "migratable", you must only want to do it. It's in no way impossible -something different is that it is not profitable. The options to keep the community data are reduced to migrate it automatically to Multiply. Any other option implies starting from scratch, including going on to Live Groups or to a competition's service, of course. I think this movement is not beneficial at all for Live nor Live Groups specifically, ...