Lycos Life – Coming Soon | Hacker News Reader

Lycos Life – Coming Soon

lycoslife.com

39 pointsxbuzz23 comments

They are gaming the brand name, it seems. Lycos was acquired by Ybrant Digital in 2010. Ybrant later merged with an Indian company. It's now traded on Indian stock exchange.

Ybrant is behind this. So, technically, not the same Lycos.

I would think that using the name Lycos would hurt the company.

I thought that too. But for some reason Ybrant is hell bent on milking it. They are still running the Lycos search engine and are slowly transitioning all their B2C products under Lycos brand.

I don't know how it helps as Lycos died in the west and nobody knew about it in India.

wow, I was kind of shocked when I realized that just now.

Oh, my first thought was "that's one company I haven't heard of in a long time". Figured Lycos is trying to do something cool for their come back. Guess not.

I don't think I've ever seen a 'smart' ring before. It seems much more convenient than carrying around a fob or smartcard, if they could make it low profile enough.

https://ringly.com/

Never seen anyone wearing one before, but my wife tells all her friends about it simply because the concept is so weird.

Yeah now that I google it apparently there are a few. Sadly they're all exactly the product I _don't_ want: One more way to receive notifications, or try to interact with my phone from a really small device.

I was thinking more in terms of identity management. If I could wear a subtle ring instead of carrying around 3 key fobs and a smart card, I'd be very interested. Especially if I could somehow do password manager/ssh keys!

wow that is actually pretty cool. my girlfriend is a huge tech / style nut I would love one of these. did not see shipping expected dates. any clue?

Back in 1998 the "Java Ring" from Sun Microsystems was designed for this purpose, and though it never became a mass-market product it got a fair amount of hype when it was new:

http://www.javaworld.com/article/2076641/learn-java/an-intro...

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/javaring-wearable-computer/

There's also Logbar, which I hear is absolutely horrible.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1761670738/ring-shortcu...

I'm amazed they raised any money. Even if it worked perfectly, the thing is so big that it's going to rub the skin raw on the palm and adjoining fingers.

The capabilities sound close to the NFC Ring: http://nfcring.com/

I remembered Lycos just recently after I discovered their headquarters driving home one evening. I used Lycos quite a bit back in the day. I poked around their website. They apparently own HotBot as well, which actually still exists. They still run Tripod and AngelFire. Blasts from the past.

I tried out their search engine, which actually wasn't half bad. Their e-mail service seemed okay in some respects, but they don't have an app and you actually have to pay for POP3/IMAP, which extremely prohibitive nowadays, especially considering their competition.

As far as these wearables are concerned, I'm at least a bit curious about the ring. Not sure how useful it will be, but I wish them the best.

Wait, this is Lycos, the search engine? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos

First reaction I had, too: "Lycos is still around?". Yes, looking at that site's About page talks about their iconic status as search engine, then media agency.

Is AltaVista going to do an IoT pivot next? Maybe Pets.com?

They made a joint venture with Geocities

I really want to read cheesy near future speculative fiction from the late '90s where they toss around hot brands of the day like that. But I don't think any cyberpunk author worth their salt would have done something so easily that would go out of date.

Though this always gets a kick out of me (Orion's Arm, online massive sci-fi collaborative project http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b2afc424975):

[2017] - Personal Virtual Reality media interfaces begin to take the market share from TV, radio, films, and other media.

[2018] - First supercomputer using memristors, 'Harvey', constructed by a team lead by Peter Shor at Bell labs, with funding from IBM, Lycos, RedHat and Pepsi.

https://imgflip.com/i/mg2ez

Wow, I thought that brand had been folded into something else years ago. I wonder what it's like to work at the ghost of a former market leader? I used to prefer Lycos as my search engine until one day I tried Google back in 1998 or so and never went back. Ah, the 20th century...

/rockingchair

I guess it's better than Dog Pile Life.

That ring is the future.

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