Annasoft Systems to Distribute CIC’s Pen Computing Products to the Embedded Systems Market

The Original Press Release

Annasoft Systems to Distribute CIC’s Pen Computing Products to the Embedded Systems Market

SAN DIEGO — May 13, 1997 — Annasoft Systems and Communication Intelligence Corporation (Nasdaq: CICI) have announced a distribution agreement whereby Annasoft Systems will sublicense CIC's family of pen products to designers of embedded PC systems. The agreement will encompass CIC's handwriting recognition, notepad, and signature security products for DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows CE platforms.

"CIC's pen products will dovetail well with our existing embedded PC products," said Annasoft Systems President Dick Eppel. "Annasoft Systems is already the largest provider of Microsoft operating systems to the embedded systems market. Together with our flash emulation software, custom BIOS products, and real-time enablers, CIC's pen products will enable us to offer our embedded PC customers a turnkey system software platform. We're especially excited about the potential for this product in the Windows CE arena, where we expect that small-form-factor data entry devices will be heavy users of pen input."

"We're pleased to have Annasoft Systems on-board as a distributor of our pen products in the embedded market," added Jeff Dao, Vice President of Marketing and Sales at CIC. "As the leading supplier of Microsoft operating systems to the embedded market, Annasoft Systems will provide us with a valuable sales channel. We have particularly high expectations for the Windows CE market, especially given the system level integration capability that Annasoft Systems enjoys through its relationships with leading Windows CE Integrators StellCom Technologies and bsquare integration."

Annasoft Systems will license three broad catagories of pen products from CIC: handwriting recognition, notepad, and security.

Handwriting Recognition

CIC's PenDOS provides a complete pen computing environment for DOS platforms that makes it easy for computer users to develop new pen-centric applications and run existing mouse-aware DOS applications using pen input.

PenDOS utilizes CIC's Handwriter Recognition System (HRS), which accurately recognizes handwritten characters without requiring recognizer training (a trainer is also available for users who want to customize HRS). PenDOS is also available with dynamic signature verification, encryption, and electronic ink compression options.

Annasoft Systems will also offer CIC's Handwriting Recognition as an option for Pen Services for Windows95, which Annasoft Systems licenses from Microsoft. Pen Services accesses the pen components (such as the ink library) that are already built into Windows, featuring an intuitive Windows95 GUI that makes it easy to enter, correct, and manipulate ink- and character-based text.

To support Windows CE users, Annasoft Systems has licensed CIC's Jot handwriting recognition system. Fully customizable, Jot is optimized for small format factor devices with tight memory constraints. Jot supports natural handwritten input and all standard keyboard characters, including international character sets. Jot is also fully customizable and features a Macro editor for defining frequently used phrases or actions.

Notepad Software

Y-Pad (Yellow pad) and QuickNotes are inking applications that act like an electronic pad of paper, collecting hand written notes and organizing them by date. Both Y-Pad and QuickNotes let users write and erase just as they would with a pencil and paper, automatically stamping each page with a date and time that is ordered chronologically for easy retrieval. The two programs also employ a compression technology (INKshrINK) that reduces the amount of memory needed to store each page to just two kbytes. Y-Pad is available for Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 platforms. QuickNotes runs on Windows CE platforms.

Ink- and Signature-Based Security Software

Annasoft Systems will also offer CIC's InkTools, a suite of software tools for incorporating ink- and signature-based security in PC applications that can augment or replace password-based security systems. Available for Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows NT platforms, the tools are implemented as 16- and 32-bit Windows DLLs.

SigCheck and SigView provide dynamic signature verification, verifying signature by looking at not only how the signature appears, but how it was written. InkSentry is a data encryption tool that is available with two algorithms: CIC's own encryption algorithm, which provides moderate security; or the ultra-secure Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm standardized by the National Institute for Standards Technology (NIST).

To minimize storage requirements for electronic signatures InkTools utilizes CIC's INKshrINK technology, a high-performance electronic ink data compression tool that provides real-time compression and decompression.