Sportal

Sportal was one of the leading companies in the dotcom boom at the end of the 1990s. Founded by Rob Hersov, and backed by BSkyB and Silvio Berlusconi's Fininvest among others, the company, originally called Pangolin, voraciously acquired rights to host a plethora of official websites of Europe’s leading football clubs (including Real Madrid, Juventus, AC Milan and Bayern Munich) as well as lower-profile sites across a number of other sports. It also opened offices across Europe and in South Africa and Australia.

In December 1999 it was valued at $170 million, and in the summer of 2000 it was named as the Sunday Times’s #1 web company at the same time it ran the website for Euro 2000, attracting record numbers of visitors. Negotiations were taking place with Vivendi Universal to sell the company for an estimated £275 million, but those coincided with the internet bubble bursting and the deal collapsed.

The bloated staffing, number of offices and poor deals meant that money was being haemorrhaged and as the world woke up to the reality that the web was not a licence to print money, the cash fast ran out.

Web portal

A web portal is most often one specially designed web site that brings information together from diverse sources in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displaying information (a portlet); often, the user can configure which ones to display. Variants of portals include mashups and intranet "dashboards" for executives and managers. The extent to which content is displayed in a "uniform way" may depend on the intended user and the intended purpose, as well as the diversity of the content. Very often design emphasis is on a certain "metaphor" for configuring and customizing the presentation of the content and the chosen implementation framework and/or code libraries. In addition, the role of the user in an organization may determine which content can be added to the portal or deleted from the portal configuration.

A portal may use a search engine API to permit users to search intranet content as opposed to extranet content by restricting which domains may be searched. Apart from this common search engines feature, web portals may offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock quotes, information from databases and even entertainment content. Portals provide a way for enterprises and organizations to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different web entities at various URLs. The features available may be restricted by whether access is by an authorized and authenticated user (employee,member) or an anonymous site visitor.