Here's another dot com biting the dust.

from businesstoday.com



Northern Light ends free rides
by Tom Kirchofer

Wednesday, January 9, 2002

Internet search software maker Northern Light Technology LLC dropped a
$50 million Indy car racing sponsorship and also will stop offering free
Web searches,
its chief executive said yesterday.

The shifts come as the Cambridge company tries to extract itself from the
sluggish business of selling ads targeted at people who use its Web site
for searches.

``It accounted for a very large percentage of our server traffic and a
very small percentage of our revenue,'' said David Seuss, Northern
Light's chief
executive. Northern Light will stop letting consumers use its Internet
search engine for free come Jan. 16.

The advertising market targeting Web surfers is in an extended downturn.
Northern Light is one of many technology companies that have prioritized
selling
their technology to business customers over showing ads to consumers.

Along with halting free searches, the company also moved to stop
plastering the its name over the Northern Light Indy Racing League
Series. When it unveiled
the racing deal about two years ago, Northern Light said it would spend
$50 million over five years to promote the series.

Yesterday, Seuss said he couldn't discuss any of the privately held
company's financial specifics. But he said that advertising accounted for
about 20 percent
of revenue, and had lately been flat.

``That was the last vestige of the time period when Internet companies
did aggressive general audience marketing,'' Seuss said of the Indy deal.
It came
a few months before Internet stocks collapsed.

Seuss - himself a race driver - said he decided to stop sponsoring the
races several months ago. The Indy Racing League made the breakup public
Monday,
blaming ``fundamental changes in the economy and the financial markets.''

Now, Northern Light is looking to sell its search software to firms for
use in internal systems.

Yesterday, the company said it had a deal with In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit
group that develops technology for the Central Intelligence Agency, to
develop a system
to sift through vast numbers of documents in different languages.

But Giga Information Group analyst Laura Ramos said Northern Light had
yet to make great progress signing up big-time corporate customers.

``They're starting to move in the right direction, but they have a long
way to go to compete with companies that have been in enterprise search a
long time,''
she said.

Northern Light also licenses a library of content from various media for
its business customers to search through.

Consumers can access the library as well. Although it's doing away with
free Internet searches, Northern Light will maintain a free feature that
lets people
search two weeks worth of news articles.

AltaVista Co., a search-engine company majority-owned by Andover's CMGI
Inc., has also placed greater emphasis on corporate customers. But a
spokeswoman
said it remains committed to offering free services to consumers.


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