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Focusing on the broadband market, Go2Net plans to merge with InfoSpace in the race to become a cross-platform-infrastructure leader.
John Keister and Russell Horowitz were classmates at a Seattle-based school that is perhaps best known for spawning another pair of mildly successful software executives. Although Bill Gates and Paul Allen attended the Lakeside School well before Keister and Horowitz, apparently some of the school's entrepreneurial magic is still at work now with Seattle-based Go2Net. On July 26, the company announced an upcoming merger with InfoSpace to create an infrastructure-services company. Go2Net now delivers an end-to-end integrated platform of applications and technologies for converging-media platforms including narrowband and broadband PCs, Ns, PDAs, pagers, cellular phones and other Web appliances. Pending regulatory approval, the new company will be called InfoSpace and will have a strong presence in the small-business market. Leveraging Go2Net's merchant base of 1.1 million, InfoSpace will have a combined merchant base of almost 2 million.
Keister, who played professional basketball in Europe, and Horowitz, who worked on Wall Street, kept in touch after their Lakeside days. When Yahoo, Netscape and others started going public back in the mid-1990s, Keister says, "The bells...