Fulcrum and CompuServe Sign Major Licensing Agreement; Agreement To Provide Millions of CompuServe Users With Powerful Searching Capabilities.

OTTAWA, Canada and COLUMBUS, Ohio--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 11, 1995--Fulcrum Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:FULCF), a leader in the market for content-based retrieval software, and CompuServe Incorporated, the international leader in affordable online information, software and communications services for the public, today announced a licensing agreement that will provide the benefits of Fulcrum's powerful searching technology to more than three million CompuServe members in 150 countries worldwide. Under the agreement with Fulcrum, CompuServe will license SearchServer, Fulcrum's flagship search and retrieval software, for use on the CompuServe Information Service.

"CompuServe members expect content and forums which are useful, informative and entertaining; they also want to find the most interesting parts of the service easily and effectively," said Tim Oren, CompuServe vice president of future technologies. "Fulcrum's software provides this capability in a proven and scalable fashion. It will support the continual explosive growth of our membership, and is a key element of our strategy to improve the usability of the CompuServe Information Service."

Fulcrum was picked by CompuServe after an extensive and rigorous evaluation process. "Fulcrum provides tools that will allow us to rapidly integrate the capabilities of the searching engine into our service," added Oren. "That was a key factor in their favor."

"This is a great application for our software," said Peter Eddison, Fulcrum's vice president of marketing. "In information-intensive applications like CompuServe's, effective searching can cut down on network traffic, with dramatic results. Improvements in efficiency translate directly into improved service for end-users, which means happy customers. Most of our corporate customers use this same software for applications that solve information access problems across local and wide area networks. In these cases the user community may be smaller, but the principle is the same."

"It's clear that we offer the searching technology of choice for online services. We count some of the biggest names among our customers, including The Microsoft Network, II Sole 24 Ore (in Italy), and UMI," added Eddison.

The CompuServe Information Service continues to be the world's most successful and most popular online service, with 3.2 million members. The undisputed industry leader in innovation, the service offers global email, the industry's first CD-ROM supplement, libraries of free software, 28.8-Kbps access and worldwide Internet services. In addition to the CompuServe Information Service, CompuServe offers networking, Internet services, electronic mail and business information services to major corporations worldwide. CompuServe Incorporated, with world headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, is an H&R Block (NYSE: "HRB") company.

Since 1983, Fulcrum Technologies has been a leading vendor of text-retrieval software because of the strength of its core indexing and searching engine, its open systems strategy, and its tools approach. Used by large and medium-sized organizations, Fulcrum's software provides access to corporate intellectual capital stored electronically, on client/server computer networks in particular. Headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, Fulcrum is traded on the NASDAQ National Market under the symbol "FULCF." -0-

Note to Editors:

Fulcrum is a registered trademark of Fulcrum Technologies Incorporated and SearchServer is a trademark (in Canada, a registered trademark) of Fulcrum. CompuServe is a registered trademark of CompuServe Incorporated and H&R Block Inc. Other trademarks used throughout this document are trademarks of their respective owners.

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CompuServe

Debra Young, 614/538-4553

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