AltaVista To Broaden Product Offerings, Add New Services

Campbell, CA -- April 15, 1995 -- A strong reception to its recently
introduced multimedia catalog design tool, "MediaWrangler Professional
Edition" has prompted AltaVista to spin off an entry-level version of the
product, simply called -- MediaWrangler -- the company announced today.

MediaWrangler, available immediately, is designed to simplify the process
of creating and viewing interactive, multimedia presentations and
catalogs. MediaWrangler Professional Edition offers more advanced features
designed for more sophisticated catalog production.

"Our goal is to make multimedia tools affordable and easy to use for
everyone," said Jack Marshall, president of AltaVista. "Accordingly, we've
introduced our entry-level product at $99. We have also added a series of
services designed to assist novice users in creating and posting catalogs
on the Internet."

These services include the creation of a free "digital postcard" featuring
a scanned image of the user's choosing, conversion of a user's catalog to
HTML code for uploading to the World Wide Web and most significantly, one
month's free display in AltaVista's vista Point, a cyber mall for
catalogs, located on the Web.

According to Marshall, the Web is a natural outlet for distribution of
interactive catalogs, "We've just made it a little easier for our
customers to get on-line," he said.

Using MediaWrangler

MediaWrangler uses an "old west" analogy to make its concepts easy to use
and understand -- using terms such as "roundup" to identify a multimedia
presentation and "hitching post" when multimedia files are grouped
together. Using this intuitive terminology and MediaWrangler's drag and
drop interface, users can easily construct an interactive catalog in
minutes by dragging images, audio, video and text into hot-spots.

Support for a wide variety of image, audio and video formats enables users
to select, manipulate and move easily between catalog elements. Transition
effects, together with auto-playback and auto-loop capability further
enhances user flexibility -- as well as the finished catalog presentation.
A built in multimedia manager allows users to assign keywords to entire
presentations or individual files, hence a real estate agent could search
for all of the pictures containing a swimming pool (individual files) or
all of the houses between $200,000 and $300,000 (entire presentations).

Among the new features is the ability to play a MIDI file in the background
while playing a wave file. This gives the user the ability to record
narration for a presentation and still have background music. Also
included in this version is a screen scaling feature that enables
presentations to fit any monitor size.

AltaVista Technology, Inc. is a developer of multimedia tools. Based in
Campbell, CA., this new company's vision is to give users the tools to
capture their imaginations as well as their professional ideas. For more
information about AltaVista products, contact the firm at 1671 Dell Ave.,
Suite 209, Campbell, CA 95008, 408-364-8777, sales@altavista.com,
http://www.altavista.com/altavista.

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