Feedster to Support Japanese RSS Feeds with Basis Technology; Rapid Growth of RSS in Japan Delivering Massive Market Opportunity.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. and SAN FRANCISCO -- Feedster and Basis Technology announced today the successful integration of Basis Technology's Japanese Base Linguistics module to support Feedster's ability to search and index Japanese RSS feeds for their syndicated content service.

Base Linguistics, a component of Basis Technology's Rosette(R) Linguistics Platform (RLP), is featured in some of the world's most widely used information retrieval and text mining applications and performs critical functions such as segmentation, decompounding, and part-of-speech analysis. A newly developed orthographic normalization capability of RLP enhances Base Linguistics by providing different spellings of common words, such as "color" and "colour" in English, to a single form. This allows search engines to find occurrences of any form of these words, which is a common and frequent instance in the Japanese language. The incorporation of these linguistics helps Feedster to expand into the growing Japanese news syndication industry.

Feedster's syndicated content service can now search millions of RSS feeds in Japanese to provide web publishers with an easy-to-use, web-based tool that helps editors quickly tailor aggregated feeds to generate new content and, as a result, new ad inventory. Editors can define how specific or broad the content subject parameters will be and have tools to offer subset content of larger topics. Using Feedster's standards-compliant XML-based feeds, this dynamic content can be a seamless part of a publisher's website, or a stand-alone feature. In Japan, these results will be accessible through mobile devices including cell phones.

RSS and blogging has rapidly spread in Japan according to research conducted last year by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications . According to the study, about 3.35 million people blog and 16.5 million read blogs in Japan. The size of both of these groups is expected to double by 2007.

"Developing the capabilities to build a multilingual search platform for Feedster is a priority, due to the explosive world-wide growth in personal and professional online publishing," said Chris Redlitz, President of Feedster. "Basis Technology provided us the tools and support we needed to build a powerful Japanese search capability that will provide tremendous opportunities to the Japanese internet media business."

The Rosette Linguistics Platform is a suite of interoperable components for applications that analyze and process all the world's languages. RLP enables information retrieval applications and search engines to understand queries and search web pages in foreign languages by providing a linguistic analysis of each word. Each product incorporates an extensive knowledge base of the nuances of each language, enabling applications such as Feedster to deliver reliable, accurate search results in many languages.

Carl Hoffman, CEO of Basis Technology said, "We're pleased to support Feedster in their entry into this exciting and dynamic market. Japan offers tremendous business opportunities, and it's great to see an up-and-coming company like Feedster take advantage of them."

About Basis Technology

Basis Technology (www.basistech.com) provides software solutions for multilingual text mining and information retrieval applications. The company's Rosette(R) Linguistics Platform is a suite of high-performance, robust, interoperable software components designed for applications that analyze and process all the world's languages.

Top-tier software vendors, content providers, multinational enterprises, and government agencies rely on Basis Technology's solutions for Unicode compliance, language identification, multilingual search, normalization, transliteration, and entity extraction. Clients include industry leaders America Online, Autonomy, Cisco, Convera, Endeca, FAST, Google, Hewlett-Packard, L.L. Bean, Microsoft, Oracle, SAS, Symantec, and Yahoo. Government contractors include BBN, CACI, Lockheed Martin, MITRE, Northrop Grumman, and SAIC.

Company headquarters are in Cambridge, MA, with branch offices in San Francisco, CA; Herndon, VA; and Tokyo, Japan. For more information, visit www.basistech.com or call 800-697-2062.

About Feedster

Feedster (www.feedster.com) is an established and rapidly growing pioneer in RSS-based technology and services. Feedster's search engine scans the Blogosphere constantly, providing a fresh look at the more than 25 million sources it tracks. Each day, Feedster adds millions of new posts from existing feeds as well as finding tens of thousands of new sources. Feedster's syndicated content service enables web publishers to aggregate dynamically updated content that can be customized for their own site visitors. Founded in March 2003, the privately held company is based in San Francisco.