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Strategies & Market Trends : Cents and Sensibility - Kimberly and Friends' Consortium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Autumn Henry who wrote (34211)	11/29/1999 8:48:00 AM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 108040

BigStar Entertainment Announces Acquisition Equity in Singles Site, Flirt.com, Acquired for Equity in BigStar Entertainment Marketing Reach of BigStar Expanded NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 29, 1999--BigStar Entertainment Inc. (Nasdaq: BGST - news), which operates www.bigstar.com, the leading online movie superstore, today announced it had acquired an equity interest in the Belamo Corporation, owner of www.Flirt.com, a direct marketing Web site dedicated to delivering products and content to women and men in their twenties. Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed. Flirt.com records more than 300,000 unique visitors each month and has 100,000 active members on its e-mail list who have requested information on products and services available both on and offline. Adding Flirt.com's members to BigStar's own mailing list of over one million unique opt-in subscribers for filmed entertainment information and promotions will greatly increase the reach and effectiveness of BigStar's marketing strategies. In addition, BigStar will be able to apply its proprietary direct marketing software BigStar Direct(TM) to this expanded user base, which will accelerate BigStar's direct marketing strategy. David Friedensohn, CEO of BigStar Entertainment, said: ``Flirt.com has all the attributes of a successful site - its content, commerce and community offerings are targeted at a demographic that has disposable income to spend on entertainment. BigStar's offerings will be most attractive to Flirt.com's members. In addition, BigStar is delighted to welcome Frederic Bien, Flirt.com's founder and CEO, on board.' Frederic Bien, the CEO and founder of Flirt.com will join BigStar as vice president of communities and marketing technology. Prior to founding Flirt.com in January 1995, Bien founded Bien Logic, an Internet solutions provider, and the largest Web design company in San Diego from 1993 through 1997, which served more than 30 corporate clients including Hewlett Packard, Xerox, Apple Computer, Netscape, Oracle and the Smithsonian Institute. Bien Logic's software development business, known for its widely used Web traffic analyzers SurfReport and ProxyReport, was sold in 1997 to Netrics, Inc. Prior to founding Bien Logic, Frederic was a professor of mathematics at both the University of California at San Diego and at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1984 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the age of 24. Frederic is the author of the book ``D-modules and Spherical Representations' published by the Princeton University Press in 1990 and is famous amongst mathematicians for his article ``Telephone Networks and Groups Representations' published in Notices of the American Mathematical Society in January 1989. As a mathematician, Frederic's specialization was Group Representations and Algebraic Geometry. In addition to his business duties at BigStar, Frederic has agreed to tutor all BigStar employees in quantum mechanics and string theory. www.Flirt.com will operate as a separate entity to BigStar and will continue to produce proprietary content. The completion of BigStar's acquisition of Flirt.com is conditional on satisfactory due diligence and complete documentation. About Flirt FLIRT.com is an e-commerce company offering a unique and innovative way for people to pursue personal relationships on the Web. The company was founded in 1995 and has evolved into ``the premier online romance portal.' FLIRT is more than a dating service or a chat board. Its services mirror that of popular web portals, however, FLIRT focuses on a central and universal theme of interest: ROMANCE! FLIRT has major alliance agreements with ELLE.com, Match.com, seeUthere.com, Electric Communities, ApparelNews.Net and others.