Excite

Excite (stylized as excite) is a collection of web sites and services, launched in December 1995. Excite is an online service offering a variety of content, including an Internet portal showing news and weather etc. (outside United States only), a search engine, a web-based email, instant messaging, stock quotes, and a customizable user homepage. The content is collated from over 100 different sources.

Excite's portal and services are owned by Excite Networks, but in the USA, Excite is a personal portal, called My Excite, which is operated by Mindspark and owned by IAC Search and Media.

In the 1990s, Excite was one of the most recognized brands on the Internet.

History

Early years

Excite was founded as Architext in 1994 by Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch and Martin Reinfried, who were all students at Stanford University. In July 1994, International Data Group paid them USD$80,000 to develop an online service. In January 1995, Vinod Khosla (a former Stanford student), a partner at the venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, arranged a USD$250,000 "first round" backing for the project, with USD$1.5 million provided over a ten-month period. Soon thereafter, Geoff Yang, of Institutional Venture Partners, introduced an additional USD$1.5 million in financing and Excite was formally launched in December 1995. In January 1996, George Bell joined Excite as its Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Excite also purchased two search engines (Magellan and WebCrawler) and signed exclusive distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, in addition to other companies. In 1994, Excite hired Jim Bellows, then 72, to figure out how to present the content in a journalistic manner. He paid good journalists to write brief reviews of web sites. However, users wanted to get directly to the content and skipped the reviews, so the partnership with Bellows ended in 1998.

Firestone 600

The Firestone 600 is an IndyCar Series race held at Texas Motor Speedway near Fort Worth, Texas. The race is held on a Saturday night in early June. From 1997 until 2005, it served as the first race after the Indianapolis 500. It resumed this place in 2010 and in 2011. When it debuted in 1997, it was the first IndyCar race in the state of Texas since 1979.

Since its inception, the Firestone 600 has widely been considered the second-largest oval track race on the IndyCar Series calendar (second only to the Indy 500) in terms of attendance, popularity, and prestige.

History

The first Championship/Indy car races in the Dallas/Fort Worth area took place at Arlington Downs Raceway in nearby Arlington, Texas. AAA sanctioned five races from 1947–1950. USAC sanctioned ten Championship car events at Texas World Speedway in College Station, Texas. The race was discontinued when the track closed in 1981.

In 1997, the IndyCar Series debuted at the track on a Saturday night in early June. It marked the first-ever superspeedway night race for American open wheel racing. During the race, one of the electronic scoring wires malfunctioned in the pit area, which caused unexpected scoring errors. Billy Boat was scored as the leader, and took the checkered flag as the winner. Arie Luyendyk, who felt he had been robbed of the win, stormed victory lane, where he was lunged at by Boat's owner, A. J. Foyt. Quickly the fight broke up. The next morning, it was determined that Luyendyk actually was the official winner. Foyt refused to return the trophy, and the race has since become a famous part of Texas Motor Speedway lore. Luyendyk received a replacement, and the "official" trophy years later, presented to him by track president Eddie Gossage.