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The price paid by eBay has not been disclosed. Earlier this year, Deja.com cancelled its scheduled stock market flotation and laid off staff after the bottom fell out of the technology market.
In June, it raised USD12.5 million in private financing from, among others, Austin Ventures, Chase H&Q, Comcast, GE Capital, Internet Capital Group, Prime New Media Ventures and ZDNet. Deja.com has offices in New York and Austin, Texas.
An eBay subsidiary, Half.com, will hire the bulk of Deja.com's technical development team to help expand its fixed price on-line marketplace for books, videos and other items into new product categories.
Deja.com's technology allows consumers to access product reviews and current product prices, as well as post their own ratings for products. The company also operates Deja Business Solutions, a licensing unit for its content and proprietary technologies.
Its other product is a popular Internet discussion group service, the user-friendly Usenet Discussion Service (http://www.deja.com/usenet/), which provides access to approximately 35,000 Usenet newsgroups.
"We made the decision earlier this year that both of our products made better sense as part of a broader service," Richard Gorelick, chief strategy officer of Deja.com, told the Wall Street Journal. "In this market, it didn't make sense to try to develop Deja as a large destination brand." Gorelick told the paper that the remainder of the company is also likely to be sold.
Deja.com was founded as Deja News in 1995 by Steve Madere to provide a user-friendly interface to Usenet, the original Internet discussion network. In May 1999, the company re-branded itself as Deja.com and extended its franchise in consumer-generated content by introducing Deja Ratings.
Deja Ratings formalised the exchange of product information already taking place in Usenet on a daily basis. Since its launch, consumers have contributed approximately one million product ratings -- an unparalleled critical mass of consumer-generated ratings and reviews.
Deja.com launched its precision buying service in February 2000. The service combines Deja.com's existing contextual discussion features, and consumer ratings and reviews with product specifications, product comparison tools, professional reviews and product pricing and availability information.
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