Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/1999/10/11/currantbun_goes_stale_gets_thrown/

CurrantBun goes stale, gets thrown in bin

News International tries again, with fiendishly renamed Bun.com service

By Tim Richardson

Posted in On-Prem, 11th October 1999 19:03 GMT

News International (NI) has conceded that less than six months after launching its CurrantBun service, the ISP has gone stale and is in need of a re-design. It admitted as much after re-branding its site and stripping out all references to dried fruit. Most radical of all is that Bun.com, as it is now known, has ended its "walled garden" approach where Net users could only view the content if they were registered. It will spend £4 million in an ad campaign to publicise the new ISP. What's more, Bun.com will also act as a central source of all NI content including The Sun, The Times, News of the World and The Sunday Times. "Ultimately, Bun.com is a new generation ISP, which will set standards for others, through its ability to offer fun, entertaining and fresh content", said Alasdair MacLeod, MD of NI Digital Publishing. (Ultimately, I can't help but think I've heard that one before - Ed). "New and existing ISPs should be warned that it is this strong commitment to content that will give us a leading edge in the Internet war," he said. In a statement he went on to say that Bun.com represents a "significant challenge" to other players in the ISP market at a time when "established brands like Freeserve are losing customers because they are failing to provide good content". Sounds like MacLeod and his Wapping chums have already started the Internet war with a bun fight by lobbing a few small-but-perfectly-formed-bread-products over the fence. ®