FreeSoftwareClub.com Subsidiary Ideas and Associates Joins Microsoft SALT Forum; Company to Participate in Setting the New Microsoft Standard.

Business Editors & Technology Writers

MONTREAL--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 2, 2002

FreeSoftwareClub.com, Inc. (OTCBB: FSWC) today announced that its Ideas and Associates subsidiary (IDEAS), announced its membership in the SALT (Speech Applications Language Tags) Forum founded by Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, SpeechWorks, Philips, and Comverse.

IDEAS will participate in defining the SALT specification to create an open, royalty-free, platform-independent standard that will make possible multimodal and telephony-enabled access to information, applications, and Web services from PCs, telephones, tablet PCs, and wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs). "Our GetVocal products already support VoiceXML version 2.0 voice web services and are built using 100% Microsoft and Intel solutions. It only makes sense as our next step to add Microsoft and Intel's SALT specification to the mix," said Christopher Matthieu, Director, Telephony Products.

The new standard--Speech Application Language Tags (SALT)--will extend existing mark-up languages such as HTML, XHTML, and XML. Multimodal access will enable users to interact with an application in a variety of ways: they will be able to input data using speech, a keyboard, keypad, mouse and/or stylus, and produce data as synthesized speech, audio, plain text, motion video, and/or graphics. Each of these modes will be able to be used independently or concurrently.

Nineteen companies, including IDEAS, were invited to become Contributor members of the new SALT Forum. As recognized technology leaders, their combined participation in specification development will ensure that SALT serves diverse industry needs, accelerating the investment in and adoption of applications that include spoken input and output.

About the SALT Forum

The SALT Forum brings together a diverse group of companies sharing a common interest in developing and promoting speech technologies for multimodal applications. Founded in 2001 by Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, SpeechWorks, Philips, and Comverse, the SALT Forum seeks to develop a royalty-free standard that augments existing Web mark-up languages to provide spoken access to many forms of content though a wide variety of devices. Information on SALT is available on the Forum's web site (www.saltforum.org).

About Ideas and Associates

Founded in 1999, Ideas and Associates (www.ideasandassociates.com) is a Montreal based IT professional services company delivering unique technology solutions to the $1.2 trillion media and entertainment industry. Ideas has carved out a differentiated position through building, acquiring and developing product lines and technologies, which enable the creation, sale, and delivery of business and consumer "content" through print, broadcast, internet telephone and wireless channels. We take a convergence approach to applying technology as a business enabler, developing processes, which integrate traditional print, radio, TV, outdoor, event and telephony methods of touching a consumer, with "new-media" channels like e-mail, web-site, chat, console games, interactive set-top-box TV and wireless hand held devices. Some of our customer base includes: 20th Century Fox, Disney, AT&T, Microsoft, IBM and Viacom.

Forward-Looking Statements: Any information contained within this news release, which is not historical data, may be deemed "forward-looking statements." Such statements reflect management's current views and are based on certain assumptions. Actual results could differ materially from the assumptions currently anticipated.