Client-Server News Distribution System Engineered for High Performance

NEW YORK, Oct. 4, 1994 -- To serve the growing market for distribution of
live news feeds within corporations, IDD Information Services has begun
delivering News Agent, designed to meet demand at the high end of the
marketplace. A client-server system based on open architecture, News Agent
is intended to fulfill high-performance requirements typical of securities
trading floors and corporate wide-area networks.

News Agent is the first real-time news filtering product providing all
these features together in an integrated system:

* Support of major information sources such as Dow Jones News
  Service
* Platform-independent Unix server
* Intelligent concept-searching
* Windows, Unix, or Macintosh user interface
* Totally scalable
* TCP/IP-standard networking
* API for custom integration

After extensive beta testing, IDD recently delivered News Agent to major
customer organizations for deployment to thousands of end-users.
Installations include a large banking institution, a major securities
trading network, and a popular consumer information service.

IDD has worked closely with Dow Jones Business Information Services to
optimize News Agent's filtering of Dow Jones news sources. News Agent
provides integral support for Dow Jones's newswire features including
story chaining, duplicate detection, subject coding, and ticker coding.
News Agent also has a lookup table for 22,000 ticker symbols used by the
Dow Jones editors.

The most popular application of News Agent is for establishing news
''profiles." A profile delineates the subjects or categories of news
stories wanted by the user. The full text of each arriving story is
analyzed for relevance to one's profile and matching stories are delivered
immediately to one's desktop computer. Every wire story also is stored on
the server for later searching by any user.

News Agent is a true client-server product that is compatible with a
variety of operating environments. It runs on almost every network with
ODI, NDIS, or packet drivers, and it is WinSock compliant. There is no
limit to the number of users or profiles that can be supported by a single
Unix server. An integrated fax interface is available for automatic or
manual faxing of news stories.

News Agent's text-search engine is linguistics-based and takes advantage of
knowledge about how English words and phrases are constructed. It
automatically identifies grammatical variations and misspellings. "Concept
expansion" is available to find news stories containing words related the
user's query terms.

News Agent provides the MIS administrator with extensive facilities for
controlling user access and costs. Individual newswires can be turned on
or off at the level of the institution, department, or individual user.
The user organization also can easily distribute its own private data
through the system as, in effect, an internal news feed.

IDD, founded in 1935, serves financial institutions and investors with
business units active in financial publishing, database publishing,
software, and consulting. News Agent was developed by the GARI Software
Associates division of IDD.

IDD Information Services
293 Eisenhower Parkway, Suite 250
Livingston, N.J. 07039
201-994-3700

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