Illustra, NetObjects and Clement Mok designs provide core technology and design for "24 Hours in Cyberspace;" database, tools and templates enable largest online publishing event.

OAKLAND, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 2, 1996--Illustra Information Technologies Inc., NetObjects Inc. and Clement Mok designs today announced they have collaborated to deliver an automated turnkey publishing solution that will form the technology foundation for "24 Hours in Cyberspace," the largest online publishing event ever staged.

Technologies from the three companies will make it possible to manage and publish digital content from hundreds of locations around the world, allowing the 24 Hours in Cyberspace team to automatically create a totally new World Wide Web site every 30 minutes.

Many industry influencers believe this technology will redefine publishing, not only for large media companies such as newspapers, magazines and other publishers, but also for many other businesses and organizations who publish information on internal and external Web sites where content is frequently changed or updated.

Photojournalist Rick Smolan, creator of the 24 Hours in Cyberspace project, said, "24 Hours in Cyberspace is a compressed version of the publishing environment faced by many organizations who need to publish and update lots of rapidly changing content from various sources.

"Digital content will be pouring in from every corner of the globe in a period of 24 hours. We need to collect, manage, edit and publish this massive amount of content quickly and easily. We couldn't have pulled off this project without the integrated enabling technologies from Illustra, NetObjects and Clement Mok designs."

A New Solution for Content Creation and Management

Illustra, NetObjects and Clement Mok designs collaborated to create a turnkey workflow, content creation and management solution for the 24 Hours in Cyberspace site. The site will include hundreds of stories and thousands of images, all shot, transmitted, collected, edited, designed and published during the course of a single day.

The most logistically complex Web undertaking to date, the 24 Hours in Cyberspace project clearly illustrates the content management challenges faced by organizations doing business on the Internet. The collaboration of Illustra, NetObjects and Clement Mok designs represents a new model for managing, creating and publishing digital content on the Web.

Contributions from photojournalists around the world will be managed using the Illustra(TM) multimedia database. Unlike traditional databases, which only support alphanumeric data in native form, the unique architecture of the Illustra database allows for rich content, including graphics, photographs, audio, video and text, to be stored and queried. The Illustra database will automatically review the emailed submissions to ensure they adhere to technical guidelines and notify the contributors of the results.

Once the raw content has been prepared, NetObjects Site Publisher(TM) will be used to build and update the entire site every 30 minutes. This authoring tool, created especially for 24 Hours in Cyberspace, allows editors to easily retrieve the content for each story from the Illustra database and assemble the stories using pre-built templates. The templates were designed by Clement Mok designs, one the world's top design firms.

Together with the NetObjects authoring tool, the templates will allow editors to use a copy-and-paste approach to build a page and toggle quickly between different story designs. Using NetObjects Site Publisher, editors will be able to place the story in various locations within the 24 Hours in Cyberspace site, and with a click, publish the entire site with all links and navigational controls automatically generated and updated.

"This is one of the most demanding Web applications ever designed," said Dick Williams, president and CEO of Illustra. "24 Hours in Cyberspace is as much a workflow challenge as it is a technology challenge.

"In addition to managing enormous amounts of rich data from all points of the earth, we also created a workflow process to meet both the ease-of-use demands of remote photojournalists and the quality-assurance requirements of Rick Smolan and his creative team. This is the ultimate in real-time, mission-critical collaboration, and it has direct practical application in the business world."

"By taking on the largest real-time website as a test of our architecture and technology for automated publishing, NetObjects is very far along in solving key problems of Internet and online publishing," said Samir Arora, CEO of NetObjects. "Our goal is to understand the site publishing and management process and provide tools that are simple, powerful and really useful."

Clement Mok, chairman of Clement Mok designs, said, "The challenge with the Web is to make information easy to create, as well as attractive and accessible. This will give the Web much greater appeal, while furthering its use and acceptance. As evidenced by our collaboration on 24 Hours in Cyberspace, Clement Mok designs and its partners are pioneering a new way of creating, presenting and delivering information over the Web."

The entire 24 Hours in Cyberspace project was conceived, designed and tested within a three-and-one-half-month period. Illustra, NetObjects and Clement Mok designs are part of a large consortium of companies, spearheaded by Kodak, Sun Microsystems and Adobe Systems, who have contributed resources and technology to support the project.

For more information about the 24 Hours in Cyberspace project, visit the site at http://www.Cyber24.com.

About the Companies

Illustra

Headquartered in Oakland, Illustra Information Technologies Inc. is the leading worldwide supplier of content management systems and tools for applications in multimedia and entertainment, digital media publishing, earth sciences and financial services.

The company's flagship product, the Illustra(TM) Server, allows users to store, manage and analyze rich multimedia data, such as audio, video, text and images, in a single database along with traditional character strings and numbers. The company was founded in 1992. For more information on the company and Illustra's products, please visit http://www.illustra.com.

Illustra recently announced an agreement to be acquired by Informix Corp., the leading supplier of high-performance, parallel processing database technology for open systems. The acquisition will enable Informix to integrate Illustra's dynamic content management systems into its core parallel database technology. On Feb. 6, the combined companies will announce the Informix Universal server, the first enterprise-capable, fully extensible relational database management system.

NetObjects

NetObjects(TM) Inc. creates website authoring, publishing and management products for people and organizations who design and develop for the Web. Its first products will solve key limitations of currently available tools. An early version of a NetObjects product is being used to automatically create, publish and update the entire 24 Hours in Cyberspace Web site on Feb. 8, 1996.

NetObjects was formed in November 1995 by Rae Technology Inc., a premier provider of applications recognized for their superior navigation, user interface and design, and Clement Mok designs Inc., an identity and information design firm specializing in design planning and design services.

Clement Mok designs

Clement Mok designs is an acknowledged leader in the areas of identity, packaging design and marketing support, interactive kiosk design, CD-ROM title design, on-line service design, interface design and information architecture.

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Note to editors: Illustra and the Illustra logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Illustra Information Technologies Inc. NetObjects and NetObjects Site Publisher are trademarks of NetObjects Inc.

CONTACT: Illustra Information Technologies

Elaine Knechtel, 415/306-4191

or

NetObjects Inc.

Judy Tarabini, 510/855-9522

or

Clement Mok designs

Nancy Raff, 415/837-0272