Home Business Information

Excite@Home is readying to launch a new browser and high-speed content portal the company says will give customers more and better access to the broadband firehose.

Susan Britton, VP-market development for Excite@Home, said the "double-barreled" announcements are part of the final integration of Excite and @Home after merging nine months ago -- even though both were in the works at @Home before that time. It also gives Excite@Home a stronger stance in an ever-widening circle of broadband providers competing for customers.

The first part of the upgrade, set to debut March 28 is a new browser dubbed @Home 2000. It will build off the Internet Explorer engine, but it will completely retool the browser that will be automatically upgraded. That will avoid requiring customers to reinstall the browser each time there is a new version.

"We've from the ground up built an online, full-service browser," Britton said. It's all created to make your life as a consumer easier and it connects directly and more quickly to broadband content."

Second, Excite@Home will debut a new broadband content portal. Up until now, the content portals at Excite@Home have relied heavily on a narrowband configuration, but now everything will be optimized for the high-speed Internet user, Britton said.

"Every place we could, we took existing content and built it up, juiced it up, turbocharged it for broadband," she said.

The portal will include a shortcut button leading users to useful utilities such as online maps, yellow pages and other resources -- all configured for broadband.

And at the top of the home page, Excite@Home will create a block for personalized content, offering users a choice of information bytes such as horoscope, stock quotes, lunar charts, news flashes and sports scores. Again, it is based on the personalized content setup of Excite's own portal page, but it is "broadbandized," Britton said.

The retooled Excite@Home broadband content page is part of a threefold strategy for the company that also includes a free narrowband ISP service newly renamed FreeLane and the narrowband Excite ISP.

"Essentially what we are doing is not only launching Excite's personalized products in narrowband but now for broadband," Britton said.

# posted by Medical Information : 3:42 AM