20 June 1995

Pittsburgh Company Established Using Lycos Internet Catalog Technology

PITTSBURGH--Carnegie Mellon University has entered an exclusive licensing agreement with a strategic investment and development company, Wilmington, Mass.-based CMG@Ventures, which has purchased exclusive rights to the Lycos Spider Technology, source of the largest known catalog of sites on the Internet.

As part of the deal, Carnegie Mellon required the company be located in the Pittsburgh area.

Under the deal, CMG@Ventures ("@Ventures") will pay Carnegie Mellon an up-front fee and equity stake in a new company, Lycos, Inc. Lycos, Inc. has been formed to develop and market the technology and will have the capital and other resources necessary to ensure Lycos' position as the preeminent Internet search and retrieval service.

Moreover, Lycos, Inc. will continue to provide free access to the Lycos service. Carnegie Mellon has provided the Internet community with a free, easy to use and comprehensive catalog and search tool since October 1994. Lycos has more than twice as many documents catalogued as its nearest competitor.

Developed at Carnegie Mellon by Michael L. Mauldin, a research scientist in the School of Computer Science, Lycos has experienced tremendous acceptance in the Internet community. With more than three million hits from over 400,000 users per week, Lycos has established itself as one of the most popular sites on the Internet.

Lycos, Inc. will offer advertising space on its site and will license the catalog as well as key technology components. With the number of users visiting the site growing rapidly, Lycos is one of the premier advertising locations on the Internet. Lycos, Inc. plans to develop a number of other related products and services all built on the Lycos catalog.

"The Lycos technology evolved to the point where it could be commercialized and we believe that this is the appropriate means to do it," said Carnegie Mellon President Robert Mehrabian. "Critical to our planning was that Lycos, Inc. and its operation be located in the Pittsburgh area."

"Catalog and search technology is key to the growth of the Internet," said Dave Wetherell, @Ventures' managing partner and CEO of CMG Information Services. "Anything on the Lycos home page will be seen by hundreds of thousands of Internet users a week."

Lycos, Inc. will continue to enhance the Lycos technology as well as provide the system resources necessary to service the increasing number of search requests. Mauldin, who will remain at Carnegie Mellon, will be actively involved in Lycos, Inc. as a consultant and will be director of the technical board, guiding further development of the Lycos technology. In addition, other members of the Lycos core team are joining Lycos, Inc.

"We had a number of offers to commercialize Lycos from the venture capital and software development communities," said Mauldin. "We chose @Ventures because it was uniquely strong in both fields, and the university felt that @Ventures would be best able to fulfill the potential of the Lycos technology consistent with the spirit of the Internet."

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