Mysimon.Com - Proprietary Technology Developed In 1998

PROPRIETARY TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPED IN (1998)

MySimon obtains price and product information through its proprietary, patent-pending VLA technology, which sends intelligent agents across the World Wide Web. Developed in 1998 by MySimon co-founder Yeogirl Yun, VLA is a highly scalable, intelligent information retrieval system that is capable of scanning thousands of Web sites and returning precise data instantly. VLA employs next-generation intelligent agent and advanced parallel search technologies to automatically search online sites for price and product information and then present it in an easy-to-read format.

Founded in April 1998 by Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun, MySimon.com was launched later in the year as a comparison shopping engine. At first the company planned to license its technology to Web portals and other sites. However, competition in licensing became more difficult when Inktomi acquired rival C2B Technologies. In addition, portals began charging higher fees, raising the cost to MySimon to reach a broad audience through them.

Under the direction of president and CEO Joshua Goodman, MySimon refocused in 1999 to become a shopping destination site. At the time MySimon was one of the few independent shopping bots. It was able to search about 1,200 merchants, more than any other service, because some merchants blocked comparative shopping engines that were owned by their competitors. MySimon.com 's revenue came from advertising, affiliate program fees, and promotional opportunities it offered merchants, such as enhanced listings.

In mid-1999 a redesigned MySimon was launched to coincide with a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign that was built around the phrase, "The future of shopping is here." A humorous character named Simon was created for the campaign to personify MySimon's shopping bot technology. Through an agreement with Active Research, informative content on products was added to MySimon through the Active Buyer's Guide. During the 1999 holiday shopping season comparative shopping sites experienced heavy traffic, and MySimon's traffic increased by 146 percent from November through December.

In January 2000 MySimon.com was acquired by CNET for $736 million in stock. CNET was in the process of transforming itself from an online publisher into an e-commerce company. During the year My-Simon added more content about products, including reviews from users and editorial recommendations, and more product categories. MySimon also included merchant ratings supplied by Gomez Advisors that assessed each merchant's reliability. Through an arrangement with Billboard magazine, visitors to MySimon.com could access the top titles on various Billboard charts and conduct comparative price searches for them.

MySimon.com enjoyed a record fourth quarter at the end of 2000 in terms of audience growth, page views, and leads. In December it was the number one pure-play consumer comparison shopping site that was not a portal. It had more than 1 million more unique visitors than its nearest competitor, based on traffic as reported by both Nielsen/Net Ratings and Media Metrix. MySimon generated more than half of CNET Networks' total leads to merchants in the fourth quarter, and more than half of MySimon's leads represented non-technology products.