With its broadband Internet service already up for sale, ExciteAtHome says it may have a buyer for its Excite.com portal.
The Redwood City, Calif.-based company this weekend filed a motion to sell certain narrowband assets for $10 million. The popular destination site was once valued at $7.8 billion.
On the buying end of the transaction is Bellevue, Wash.-based InfoSpace , who says it will front the $10 million bid and then hand it over to Irvington, NY-based iWon.com. InfoSpace says it will then manage the new Excite.com site, according to published reports.
iWon offers registered users entries in a cash prize drawing in exchange for clicking on various ads and other links.
Whoever ends up with the pink slips to Excite’s popular portal is expected to get certain domain names, trademarks and user traffic, but no physical assets. Translaton: no Herman Miller Aeron chairs and no foosball table.
Also on the hands-off list – technology assets, employees, products and services required to continue providing a full-service broadband portal, including personalized start page, content, e-mail, search and instant messenger, to @Home broadband subscribers.
The sale still has to jump over the bankruptcy court approval hurdle and a bankruptcy court-supervised overbidding process, where other bidders with fatter wallets may still come forward.
If you think you might be interested, just apply with Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin Capital. They are the team in charge of monitoring any additional bids.
ExciteAtHome says it just wants to make sure that the assets go to a good home.
“During the bidding process, ExciteAtHome will be working to return the best value to our financial stakeholders and to offer the best solution for continued service for our Excite users,” says ExciteAtHome chairman and CEO Patti Hart.
Some type of deal to sell off the company’s portal division was highly anticipated after ExciteAtHome filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy at the end of September and said it would sell its @Home broadband division to AT&T for the cool sum of $307 million.
But an official sale of the portal side of ExciteAtHome didn’t seem like it would ever happen until Robert White, the attorney representing Excite@Home in bankruptcy court, hinted at negotiations of a third party buyout last week.
The company has also been slowly dissipating as it begins the payback process to investors and ever since the departure of more than half of the company’s original board of directors.
