the investor page from infospace has been updated....this letter to the share holder's is there from Naveen Jain plus much more..click on the picture
infospace.com
Naveen's letter to you and me and all the other loyal shareholders
InfoSpace's performance in the year 2000 demonstrates the continuing success of our products and services in the markets for consumer and commerce infrastructure services. Our wireless business continued to demonstrate strong growth and we expect wireless revenues to more than double in 2001. We ended the year with positive momentum in two of the fastest growing areas of our business: wireless and merchant.
InfoSpace is working to change how people access information, conduct commerce, communicate and otherwise manage their lives anywhere, anytime and from any device.
InfoSpace continues to be a platform of choice for many wireless carriers. We have relationships with a distinguished list of partners including Verizon, Cingular, AT&T Wireless, ALLTEL, Qwest, Powertel, Cincinnati Bell and VoiceStream, and we plan to seek more strategic relationships in the future.
Our wireless relationships continue to expand beyond the U.S., most recently with the launch of our platform with several carriers in Brazil, the growth and support of our SMS- and WAP-based services in Europe, and our recently launched platform of services with Virgin Mobile in the U.K.
We have established relationships with leading network infrastructure providers such as Nortel and Lucent to help take our platform to more wireless carriers internationally. Our partnerships further demonstrate our ability to optimize our technologies for both manufacturers of wireless devices and wireless carriers.
We are working to expand our platform to deliver more innovative services to our partners. We recently announced the addition of multi-lingual speech recognition technologies which we plan to use to offer speech-based applications to our wireless carrier partners. These technologies will help make every wireless phone a Web-enabled phone, so carriers can deliver our wireless data services to their customers.
On the merchant side, we now have a network of more than two million merchants using our services. In addition, we reported that in the fourth quarter our Authorize.Net payment processing platform continued to demonstrate growth by processing more than six million transactions, representing more than $449 million of transactions.
We continue to work to establish a national reseller initiative to access the approximately 10 million local merchants in the U.S. We currently have partnerships with all the regional bell operating companies such as SBC, leading merchant aggregators such as American Express, local media networks such as Entertainment Publications and hardware manufacturers such as Toshiba.
As a result of success to date in attracting online and offline merchants through our reseller network and offering innovative services such as wireless promotions, we have been able to scale our business and enter the mobile commerce, or "m-commerce" market.
To date, we have announced expanded relationships with leading wireless carriers such as Cingular and AT&T Wireless that will be using InfoSpace to help them offer innovative new commerce services. With expanded services and relationships, we believe more merchants will look to the wired and wireless Internet for ways to increase their visibility and more effectively promote and transact business.
Merchant services and wireless services are two of the fastest growing areas of our business today. Going forward, we are positioning ourselves to take advantage of another emerging market - broadband. We've announced strategic agreements with broadband platform providers such as Microsoft, OpenTV and Liberate, and working to develop our first broadband application with Bloomberg TV. We expect that 2001 will be a building year for our broadband services as we work to establish the foundation for growth in this area.
While current economic conditions are challenging and afford limited visibility as to the future, we believe our outlook is positive because we continue to consistently deliver value to our partners. The dedicated, experienced and passionate team that is InfoSpace today is committed to generating long-term value for our shareholders. We believe that our opportunities are clear, and we will continue to aggressively pursue them.
Thank you for your continued support.
Naveen Jain |
