From strategy, marketing, and corporate development to operations and international
deployment, LycosLabs harnesses the experts who have built Lycos into one of the
world's largest and most profitable networks of Web destinations. E-commerce,
infrastructure, technology, and viral applications are a few of the areas that LycosLabs
will consider for investing and active business acceleration.
• It does not incur development costs:
• It uses an efficient "format once, use many times" approach.
Terra, by contrast, tended to develop content itself after acquiring local companies
to acquire local expertise. This strategy followed from Telef6nica's original strategy
of creating an Internet presence in different Latin American countries by purchasing
local ISPs or content companies. In some cases, Terra also used exclusive
contracts to outsource content development, but it never cobranded content. In general,
Terra sought control and ownership. The advantages of Terra's approach are the
following:
• Acquisition brings local expertise in house.
• It can create content to meet unsatisfied needs (for which no third-party provider
exists).
• It has a greater degree of control over the content portfolio.
• Terra owns everything and can extract maximum value from it.
On balance, each strategy worked for its respective company.