Activerse unveils first "People Browser" at Internet Showcase.

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 28, 1997--

Ding! -- The Next Indispensable Internet Application

Activerse Inc., an Austin, Texas-based developer of Internet communications and collaboration software, Monday unveiled Ding!(R) -- its new all-Java application -- at David Coursey and Upside magazine's Internet Showcase.

Ding! defines an entirely new category of Internet software -- the "People Browser." Ding! users know at a glance who's online and who's available and can then communicate with them instantly and directly in a variety of ways: instant messaging, two or multi-party chat, file/URL transfer, and status bulletins. Ding! finally gives users access to the all-important network resource: other people.

"The Internet is a tremendous resource of information and access to systems. The thing that's critically missing on the Internet today is a means for people to find each other online and interact directly," says Steve Vandegrift, chief executive officer of Activerse.

"The Net, as it stands, provides users no sense of presence. We think there's a coming wave of Internet software that will address exactly that problem. We call that application category People Browsers, and Ding! is our entry into that space."

Ding! Lets People Interact Online

Ding! presents a list of friends and colleagues to its users. At a glance, a Ding! user can see who's online, whether others are busy or available, and what they're doing at that time. With a simple point-and-click operation, users can instantly initiate various forms of communication with others, thus providing a kind of spontaneous and quick interaction unavailable in applications like e-mail or even telephones.

"Ding! is an exciting product that makes it easier for online workers to function effectively," says David Coursey, producer of Internet Showcase and a highly regarded editor, columnist, and analyst. "This is a product which helps turn 'the' Internet into 'your' Internet. I'm looking forward to using it to keep my staff and contractors in better touch."

People Browsers

Although various pieces of Ding! functionality ("who" or "buddy lists", chat, etc.) have been available on timesharing systems, like UNIX, and online services, like AOL, for some time, Activerse is quick to point out that People Browsers are an entirely new category of Internet software.

"People Browsers like Ding! do for people what the Web and Web browsers did for information -- provide easy, immediate access, anytime, anyplace," says Jeff Bone, chief technologist at Activerse.

"The Web Browser was innovative because it used a simple hypertext metaphor to pull together the pre-existing ideas of network navigation, file transfer, multimedia content handling, and database access into a standards-based platform for information access."

"Similarly, People Browsers utilize a simple metaphor -- the dynamic buddy list -- to provide a basic mechanism for pulling together different kinds of real-time communication such as chat, instant messaging, file transfer, Web browser sharing, and so on," adds Bone.

"Like the Web browser, the value will be in the integration and synthesis of features, and in open standards. Over the next several months, People Browsers will become the basic platform for people interacting directly online."

Ding! -- Scalable, and Secure

Ding! uses a unique distributed system architecture that is primarily peer-to-peer. This allows Ding! to scale to encompass millions of users reliably and efficiently. By minimizing the dependence on central servers, Ding! avoids performance and reliability problems related to server load. This peer-to-peer architecture is also inherently more secure than server-centric architectures.

The Strategic Importance of Openness

"We believe that open standards are critical to the success of this new application category," says Bone. "For that reason, we are preparing a specification of the basic protocol used in Ding! for submission to the Internet Engineering Task Force and other appropriate standards bodies. We hope that others will make use of this protocol to build a rich family of interoperable products.

Also, Ding! uses as much off-the-shelf technology as possible: LDAP, Netscape's foundation classes, and so on. It's written entirely in Java, and is designed to be extensible. We have an open API for integrating with Java and non-Java communications tools into Ding!, and we are aggressively pursuing third-party developers to help us turn our People Browser into a rich application platform."

Ding! Pricing and Availability

A preview version of Ding! was demonstrated today at Internet Showcase. Activerse is currently in closed alpha testing of Ding!, and anticipates an open beta program beginning in May. Interested parties may register for the beta program at the Activerse website -- http://www.activerse.com/ .

The release version of Ding! will be available for download this summer. Activerse anticipates distributing the software online as "licenseware." Ding! will be free for non-commercial use, and will be priced at $29.95 per user for full support commercial use. Later this year, Activerse will offer an adjunct product, Ding! Switchboard, that will allow organizations to establish their own internal or external Ding! directories.

Ding! is a cross-platform, all-Java standalone application. The initial distribution of Ding! will target Windows 95 and NT users, with support for all major Java platforms being added over time. Ding! requires that users have an Internet connection.

About Activerse

Activerse (formerly Active Paper Inc.) was founded in October 1993. Its initial products successfully addressed the challenge of extending Internet communication capabilities, including electronic mail and Web browsing, to consumer computing devices such as PDAs and set-top boxes.

In one of the largest transactions of its kind in the PDA market, Active Paper's Presto!Mail and Presto!Links products were acquired by General Magic and now form the core of General Magic's Internet strategy.

The transaction led one analyst to declare Active Paper as the only profitable company in the PDA marketplace. After successfully completing a major round of private financing, Active Paper acquired Intraverse, a start-up company formed by the developers of VisualWave(TM), one of the most popular application development environments for the World Wide Web.

The combined company, Activerse, is developing a new set of advanced software products designed to enable network-based, computer-supported collaboration.

For more product and company information contact: Activerse Inc. 1301 West 25th Street, Suite 1200 Austin, TX 78705 Telephone: [phone], ext. 29 Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail] Web: http://www.activerse.com -0-

Ding! is a registered trademark of Activerse Inc. Activerse and Active Paper are trademarks of Activerse, Inc. All other product names or trademarks are the property of their respective owners and are used in this release for identification purposes only.

CONTACT: GTT Communications Inc., Austin

Bill Stotesbery, 512/347-1012

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