Alacritude Acquires Elibrary and Encylopedia.com

Posted on September 13, 2002

Alacritude, LLC, a new company focusing on online research, announced that it has purchased eLibrary and Encyclopedia.com from Tucows Inc. Alacritude's primary focus will be to provide web surfers with online tools that will allow them to organize and package online information from both proprietary and free sources. Alacritude also plans to provide tools that will allow its customers to better organize and package search results for use with such commonly used applications such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

Founded by Patrick Spain, co-founder and former chairman and CEO of Hoover's, Inc., with additional financing from a group of Chicago-based investors, the company plans to invest in and operate companies that are positioned at what Spain calls, "the intersection of technology and media."

"Individual researchers -- whether searching for information on matters relating to health, wealth or their personal interests -- spend less time finding good information online and more time trying to do something with that information," said Spain, who serves as Alacritude's chairman and CEO. "Google and others have made it easier to find good information. We believe that the next opportunity is to fulfill the as yet unmet need to provide individuals with tools to help them organize and make practical use of what they have found."

With its purchase last month of the two research services -- eLibrary and Encyclopedia.com, bought from Tucows Inc. last month -- Alacritude comes out of the gate with over 1 million users and thousands of individual paying subscribers. Encyclopedia.com is a free online encyclopedia and eLibrary is a subscription-based digital archive of more than 13 million documents. eLibrary includes documents from over 2000 publications including newswires, newspapers, magazines, journals, transcripts, photographs, maps and books.

"If you work for a large enterprise, you may have access to the highest quality, credible information resources, such as LexisNexis, Factiva, and other premium research services," Spain said. "Individuals can't afford these high-priced services -- yet they still need trustworthy sources of information not available free on the Web. These individuals also account for 25 percent of all spending on information. We believe that there is a huge opportunity to deliver a service that applies innovative organizing and packaging tools to enterprise-quality information."

Alacritude has plans to acquire and develop additional services and technologies. Alacritude's administrative and marketing functions operate out of its Chicago headquarters and the technical and customer services functions operate out of an office in King of Prussia, PA.