Terra Lycos Launches First Bilingual Wap Portal.

Terra Lycos announced that it has launched the first Spanish and English Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) portal available at http://wap.terra.com, which joins its English language WAP portal http://wap.lycos.com., launched earlier this year as part of the Lycos Anywhere initiative. The new portal provides users with email, search, directory, news, sports results, weather and more to wireless users, both in Spanish and English.

The portal targets the exploding market for wireless Internet devices in the US, including Internet-enabled WAP phones and a large number of hand-held devices and personal digital assistants (PDAs).

Users of both the Terra and Lycos Networks of Web sites now have access to a multilingual search catalog of more than 2 million WAP-enabled pages in its index. Available in English and Spanish, the Terra and Lycos WAP search, was developed by FAST Search and Transfer of Norway. The new service also provides users access to a customized, bi-lingual directory of U.S. WAP sites organized by relevance and selected by editors at Pinpoint.

With a WAP-enabled phone or hand-held device, users can search the wireless Web, or access a wide variety of news, weather, traffic, financial, sports, entertainment, and other information services.

Joaquim Agut, executive chairman of Terra Lycos, said “Terra Lycos is uniquely able to deploy new products in multiple languages drawing on the resources of our constituent organizations around the world”. Joaquim Agut added “Mobile applications, such as our new WAP search and email, are a great example of the tremendous synergies of the Terra and Lycos Networks that enable us to roll out these functions more rapidly and to offer a greater experience to our users and advertisers”.

Ron Sege, president of U.S operations for Terra Lycos, said “The products were designed specifically for wireless users to provide the best searching experience available on the wireless Internet, and we are thrilled to deliver it to both English and Spanish users”. “Wireless Internet access is growing at an incredible rate here in the U.S., and even more rapidly in other parts of the globe, and Terra Lycos will continue to lead in the development of wireless product offerings.”