WP's birthday gift

Users of WP's e-mail service will now have access to what's thought to be the largest free mailbox in the country with a capacity of 3GB as the portal chalks up its first decade on the market.

Moreover, it is making another attempt at launching a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) service: neither WP Kontakt, nor WP Nawijka quite worked out, so now the time has come for Spik to try and win the hearts of WP users. At the moment, it is going through the testing phase.

After years of liquidity problems and court battles between Telekomunikacja Polska - the majority shareholder of WP - and Maciej Grabski and Jacek Kawalec, co-founders of the second biggest internet portal in Poland, WP can now hold its birthday celebrations in peace.

The warring parties - TP, TP Internet, Virgo (the latter two are subsidiaries of TP), Grabski Inwestycje Finansowe (GIF), Key7 Investments, Maciej Grabski and Jacek Kawalec - put their signatures to an agreement earlier this year.

The settlement saw Virgo purchasing a stake of 19.54 percent in WP from GIF and Key7 for a sum of zł.165 million and then investing a further zł.55 million the moment TP regains control over the portal.

Wirtualna Polska was Poland's first internet portal and was launched at the same time as international e-giants like Yahoo, E-bay and Amazon.

According to the recent Megapanel PBI/Gemius survey, WP's market penetration amounts to 62.25 percent, which makes it the second most popular internet portal in Poland after Onet.pl.