Top Community Sites Begin Trials of Paralogic ANEXA.

FREMONT, Calif--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 8, 1998--

New Internet service creates 'microcommunities' of

select interest groups in seconds

Paralogic Software Corporation today announced that NetNoir and The Holiday Channel's Santa.com, prominent Web community sites designed for black audiences and Christmas shoppers respectively, have begun trials of Paralogic's new ANEXA(TM) service for creating online communities that cater to special interest groups.

ANEXA enables Web site visitors to quickly build "microcommunities" that include chat, discussion forums, calendars, guestbooks and news postings for fellow visitors who share common interests. The advantage for Web businesses is the ability to generate repeat visits to their sites, building traffic for online stores and other offerings.

NetNoir expects the ANEXA service to produce microcommunities centering around black women, teens, gospel and other themes and topics important in the African-American community, drawing potential customers for the products and services offered at the site and enabling it to expand its base of advertisers and e-commerce vendors.

Santa.com expects families separated by geographical distances to use the service to pool information about Christmas gift wish lists and celebrations, then take advantage of the site's virtual store to do their Christmas shopping while they are online.

"We envision busy people creating 'family rooms' where they can go to post messages and traditional family recipes, plan holiday parties, schedule online meeting times where they can discuss what to get Mom and Dad for Christmas, and talk about plans for the upcoming family Christmas celebration," said Catherine Gonzales, president and founder of The Holiday Channel and Santa.com.

"While they're at our site for those purposes, however, they will also be able to get free printable Christmas cards and animated e-postcards, great ideas of gifts to make and projects to do at home, and the ability to order gifts, their Christmas tree and even Christmas dinner while they're sitting at their keyboards," Gonzales said. "The key to developing repeat buying customers is to build and nurture the community, and ANEXA will give us the means to do that."

"ANEXA will enable us to leverage all the traffic-building momentum we already have in place and put it all together in a way that will help keep our visitors coming back," said Malcolm Casselle, chief technology officer for NetNoir. "We are using it as an application to build our brand on the Web."

ANEXA leverages Paralogic's ParaChat technology, the most popular Java chat solution on the Web. Feedback from many of the over 250,000 Webmasters who use ParaChat helped define the features for ANEXA's online communities. Paralogic then created dynamic templates to build a prepackaged solution that would be fast and transparent to the user.

ANEXA is designed to be private-labeled on the customer's Web site and used for member registration, open and member-only chat rooms, announcements, events calendar, bookmarks, classified ads, guest books, e-mail invitations, mailing list management and a variety of other functions. Individual users can set up a microcommunity in seconds using ANEXA's templates.

Microcommunity sites created by ANEXA are hosted on Paralogic's servers and may use their own registered domain name or anexa.paralogic.com/yourname. The system is scalable to accommodate users ranging from small groups to social or professional clubs, schools, alumni organizations and entire towns. Pricing is based on the number of registered members and begins as low as $100 per month.

"ANEXA is part of the emerging instant community marketplace like Yahoo! Clubs and Excite Communities. Unlike Yahoo and Excite that tend to build their own brand, ANEXA is the only cobrandable solution in the market today. That means it's the first service that gives individual businesses the ability to quickly create dynamic, full-featured microcommunities on their Web sites," said Sheena Vaidyanathan, co-founder of Paralogic. "The early participation of NetNoir and Santa.com is an indication of the strong appeal of this kind of service and the enormous potential for microcommunities as a driving force behind Web businesses."

For more information, call 510/795-0559, e-mail [e-mail], or visit www.paralogic.com on the Web.