CatalogCity.com and Altura Software Inc. Form Altura International.

Business Editors/Technology Writers

PACIFIC GROVE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 1, 2000

CatalogCity.com and Altura Software Have Joined Forces to Form Altura

International

This Powerful Combination of CatalogCity.com's Merchant Content and

Altura Software's Proprietary Operating System Provides the Platform

for a Global Network of Customized Online Shopping Malls

In today's waxing and waning world of financially troubled B2C Web outlets, one company continues to effectively implement its strategy.

CatalogCity.com (www.catalogcity.com) is an unquestionable B2C success. Partnering with the world's foremost experts in delivering a compelling remote-shopping experience, this innovative site allows consumers to search, browse and purchase from hundreds of brand-name merchants through a single universal online shopping cart.

By re-hosting the content of some of the world's best-known brands, including The Sharper Image, Neiman Marcus, Hammacher Schlemmer, Hanover Direct, J. Jill, Ross-Simons and TravelSmith, among many others, CatalogCity.com combines these companies' products and their history of delivering known quality, secure transactions and exceptional customer service with the extraordinary reach of the Internet.

The resulting business is a unique shopping environment where enthusiastic shoppers discover catalogs as well as buy products from merchants they know and trust. Merchants gain new customers, customers gain easy access to the world's best products and CatalogCity.com is growing rapidly thanks to this mutual success ... and, there's more.

The core competency of this not-from-the-Silicon-Valley company is the software that drives its powerhouse of products. The merchant operating system that powers CatalogCity.com was created by Altura Software Inc., a company also owned by CatalogCity.com's founder and chief executive officer, a highly successful software entrepreneur, Lee Lorenzen.

Since its inception in 1990, the primary mission of Altura Software has been the creation of a proprietary software that makes life easier for its customers. From an early focus on publishing products for the catalog industry, the company saw the Web as the answer to low-cost publishing for catalogers and one-stop shopping for consumers.

The outgrowth of this early insight was the development of the Altura Merchant Operating System ("AMOS"). This proprietary technology is the only multi-vendor, multi-lingual, multi-currency e-commerce platform that gives consumers a single shopping cart they can use at different Web sites around the

globe. AMOS offers consumers easy access to a global marketplace through a convenient, consistent, one-stop shopping experience.

AMOS is also very versatile. So much so that the company uses this patent-pending technology to build custom online malls for other mall owners; powering custom malls for XOOM.com, GO.com, Gifts.com and NetDeals.com; integrated stores on Yahoo! Shopping and Quixtar; product offers on InfoSpace, Lycos and Excite; and private-label stores for GoodCatalog, Alsto's and Heavenly Treasures, among others.

These sites are in addition to its house-brand malls -- CatalogCity.com, CatalogueCity.co.uk, CatalogueCity.fr, ProductCity.com and GiftLink.com.

And that brings us to the strategic plan.

Rather than spend hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to drive traffic to its content, this clever company places its content at the virtual intersections of the Web where heavy traffic already exists. From the beginning, Lorenzen and his core team of employees who've worked with him over the last decade, envisioned numerous opportunities for AMOS going well beyond its initial application, CatalogCity.com.

Now the content of CatalogCity.com (B2C) and the technology of Altura Software (B2B) are being brought together under a new identity, Altura International (B2B2C). This name change better represents the positioning of the company as its global vision unfolds.

Altura International ("Altura") has quietly emerged as the leading architect, developer and manager of customized shopping environments on the Web. Its flagship mall, CatalogCity.com, will continue to be developed as a consumer destination site and will also serve as a test-bed for Altura's team of engineers and merchandisers who are continuously seeking ways to exceed customers' expectations.

These "best practices" will then be applied to its custom malls as requested by mall owners or demanded by consumers. This approach allows Altura to pursue its strategic focus of building malls at the virtual intersections of the Internet.

The Mall Owners, Mall Merchants and Mall Shoppers that are linked together via AMOS, are referred to as the Altura Network. This Altura Network increases in convenience and value with each new shopping area Altura builds for a Mall Owner, with each additional product offer Altura manages for a Mall Merchant and with each personal e-commerce account created for a newly registered Mall Shopper.

Mall Merchants and Mall Owners cooperate to provide Mall Shoppers with a standard browsing and buying experience both within each store in their respective malls and across different malls. This is accomplished by having AMOS maintain a centralized personal shopping account for each of the Mall Shoppers in the Altura Network.

Unlike first-generation "wallet" technologies, this "security-guaranteed" AMOS account not only keeps track of a shopper's address and credit card information, but also maintains a cross-vendor shopping cart, address book, gift registry, order history, date reminder, set of privacy preferences, loyalty program and gift certificates.

But what will Altura International and AMOS mean to the future of Internet retailing? Lorenzen said: "The catalog industry's push technology generates over $100 billion of revenue per year, and we believe there's a missing $100 billion that our pull technology will help them attract."

Altura will build on the strengths of its technology and partnerships with hundreds of top name-brand merchants as the company continues to bring the buyer and seller together by providing a compelling value proposition for Mall Merchants, Mall Owners and, as always, to the Mall Shopper. In other words, shoppers will have access to products and services from around the globe, and Mall Merchants and Owners will have the world as their market.

Altura International is a privately held company and currently has headquarters in Pacific Grove. To accommodate its continuing growth, Altura will relocate to the Ryan Ranch complex in Monterey, Calif., in August 2000.

The company is partially funded by Bill Gates and Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO), among others. More information can be found by visiting the company's Web site at www.altura.com or its flagship mall at www.catalogcity.com.