Search Technology Visionaries From LingoMotors Form Management Team; Industry's Best Collaborate to Create Ordinary Language Search Technology.

Business/Technology Editors

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 7, 2000

Leading executives from the Internet, linguistics and emerging technology industries have joined forces at Cambridge, MA-based LingoMotors to develop next-generation search technology. This accomplished four-member senior management team brings experience from numerous high-profile organizations including Philips Electronics, Teloquent Communications Corporation, MIT and Sprint Data Group. The team includes: John Hanselman, President and CEO; Dr. James Pustejovsky, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer; Jim Keller, Vice President of Business Development and Jeff Fried, Vice President of Product Development.

"LingoMotors' senior management team is an all-star cast that strikes a perfect balance with our creative masterminds. We've assembled a talented team that not only understands how to develop and capitalize on new technology products, but also possesses the vision to create breakthrough search technology capabilities," said President and CEO John Hanselman. "This group will lead LingoMotors in revolutionizing search technology through the use of Ordinary Language(TM), part of our patent-pending technology that empowers users to pose `type the way you talk' search questions that deliver superior results."

As President and CEO, Mr. Hanselman is the driving force behind LingoMotors. Prior to joining the company, he was General Manager and the Director of Semiconductor-USA at Philips Electronics, where he was responsible for its solution set in North America. Mr. Hanselman joined Philips when they acquired Active Impulse Systems, of which he was founder and CEO. Mr. Hanselman has written and frequently spoken on new technology and holds patents in the semiconductor and the natural language field.

"The key to LingoMotors TurboSearch technology is its' ability to process all forms of text, both structured and unstructured, to extract the underlying meaning of any question. This allows the user to search for products, ideas and concepts on the Internet without their needing any knowledge of keyword search techniques. They just ask a question," explains Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Dr. James Putsejovsky.

"Our premier product, TurboSearch, allows the user to return highly accurate, superior results with First-Page Relevance(TM), while eliminating pages of irrelevant data," continued Dr. Putsejovsky.

As Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of LingoMotors, Dr. Pustejovsky was the early vision behind the revolutionary technology. He is a leading expert in applying ordinary language and lexicon technologies to automated text classification and knowledge extraction in the areas of natural language semantics and lexical modeling. He has also authored and edited eight books and more than 50 articles pertaining to natural language and computational linguistics. In addition, he holds degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Massachusetts and is a Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University, where he also directs the Laboratory for Linguistics and Computation.

As Vice President of Business Development, James Keller brings to LingoMotors an extensive background in addressing Internet business and policy issues relating to the Internet. Prior to joining the company, Mr. Keller was the Associate Director of Harvard University's Information Infrastructure Project and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He has published numerous books and articles on issues in the development of the Internet. Mr. Keller holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Yale University.

As Vice President of Product Development, Jeff Fried brings more than 23 years of business, Internet and communications experience to LingoMotors. Mr. Fried was Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer for Teloquent Communications Corporation, a provider of customer relationship management systems including telephony, email and web solutions for virtual call centers. Prior to Teloquent, Mr. Fried worked at GTE research labs, spearheading development of a series of advanced communications products and developing a number of spin-off companies. He has also been a principle at Andahl, Wang, IBM and Computervision. Mr. Fried holds 13 U. S. patents. He earned his B. S., M. S., and Engineer's degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

LingoMotors' first product, TurboSearch, has drawn wide interest from the emerging technology industry; partnerships with top e-commerce and search engine sites will be announced by year's end.

About LingoMotors

Stationed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, LingoMotors (www.lingomotors.com) builds superior search technology using patent-pending software that allows questions to be asked in Ordinary Language(TM). This next-generation technology uses deep, concept understanding to provide users with the best results to search engine queries. LingoMotors empowers the user to pose "type the way you talk" search questions that deliver superior results and eliminate pages of irrelevant data. The LingoMotors technology team, which includes 16 Ph.D.s, has developed 19 proprietary, patent-pending technologies that drive next-generation search capabilities. The company was founded in December 1997 and was formally known as Lexeme.