EDConnexions Contact: Ms. Michele Spillman EDConnexions Pty Ltd. Phone: 61 3 9877 9922 e-mail: sales@edconnexions.com.au CharacTell Contact: Mr. Ofer Comay CharacTell Ltd. Phone: +972-3-648-9484 e-mail: ofer@charactell.com EDConnexions to Market CharacTell's SoftWriting in Australia and New Zealand Blackburn, Victoria, May 9, 2002 - EDConnexions Pty Ltd (EDConnexions) of Blackburn, Victoria, a leading Australian distributor of educational software in Australia and New Zealand since March 2001, and CharacTell, Ltd., a leading provider of advanced and innovative optical character recognition products, today announced that they have concluded an exclusive distribution agreement to market CharacTell's SoftWriting™, an advanced handwriting recognition system. "Other programs have offered good performance for quite some time now, but with SoftWriting OCR software now rises higher. SoftWriting version 3.2 reads even handwritten texts." These were the words of the editors of PC Magazine (Germany) when they nominated SoftWriting for the coveted Product of the Year 2001 Award last February. Reflecting on the business behind this relationship, Michele Spillman, Managing Director of EDConnexions, said "CharacTell's flagship handwriting recognition product, SoftWriting, is perfect for our clientele, and has already received enthusiastic support from Tertiary stores across the country. This is a strong reflection of SoftWriting's ability to help students and educators alike improve their productivity in the way they handle handwritten materials and notes." Advanced Character Recognition (ACR) CharacTell's ACR is based on principles of character mapping similar in concept to those used in human gene and DNA mapping. One may think of this mapping approach as a significant technological breakthrough in comparison to traditional feature extraction and neural networks-based products. ACR utilizes a highly accurate set of mapped strings that describe each character uniquely and speedily. Training is also much reduced: only a few hundred characters are needed to train on a new font, language or character type, thus making ACR a powerful tool when data types cannot be fully projected in advance. EDConnexions Pty Ltd. Company Information EDConnexions was founded in 2001 with the mission to focus entirely on and specialise in the educational market. "The main advantage that EDConnexions has over its competitors is our policy of distributing exclusively to the educational market," said Michele Spillman. "We believe that the educational market is too different than the retail market to be able to successfully specialise in both," said Ms Spillman.  This strategy has attracted quality software publishers like CharacTell to work with EDConnexions," said Michele. EDConnexions has established an extensive network of vertical resellers, and is strongly committed to supporting and participating in seminars and other events within the educational market in Australia and New Zealand. For more information contact EDConnexions at +61 3 9877 9922, or visit the EDConnexions web site at www.edconnexions.com.au. CharacTell's Company Information CharacTell Ltd was founded in 1998 with the express mission of developing the world's most accurate recognition engines. The company has developed Advanced Character Recognition (ACR) as the strategic technology platform on which it bases its progressive product line. ACR-based products from CharacTell are in extensive use in demanding data entry applications and systems worldwide. CharacTell also markets SoftWriting™ and iREAD Notes™ Pro, two end-user application products dedicated to the conversion of unstructured documents containing non-connected, hand-written notes to editable form. For more information, contact CharacTell Ltd. at (617) 965-1014, or visit the CharacTell Ltd. web site at www.charactell.com.