WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 4, 1998 -- The award of three patents to Open Market Inc. is a welcome development because it tends to confer credibility on a new class of technologies which leverage the Internet's diversity, the president of Clickshare Service Corp. said on Wednesday.

Clickshare is a development-stage, privately funded technology company which owns rights to an Internet distributed user-management system. The patent-pending system enables micropayments and other services. The full statement by the company's president and co-founder, William P. Densmore Jr., appears below.

"The award on March 3 of the last of three patents to Open Market Inc. is a welcome development because it tends to confer credibility on a whole class of transaction technologies -- those which leverage the distributed diversity of the Internet rather than try to close it.

"Corporate technology managers and publishers are confused by the claims and features of different vendors. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office examiners, while themselves overwhelmed with filings, are nonetheless a corps of unbiased technical analysts whose only goal is to recognize novel and useful inventions. This helps the marketplace to separate valid products from vaporware and potential standard-bearers from position seekers. In the Internet environment, this may be more valuable to the patent holder than license fees or royalties.

"The Open Market patents, at first blush, do not appear to be so broad as to foreclose other approaches to Internet commerce. Rather, they signal that in the Wild West environment of the Internet, good ideas don't all come from large corporations.

"Clickshare's Token Validation Service (TVS), engineered in 1994 and 1995 and subject of a pending patent application, is a compatible and collaborative technology which enables information micropayments, personalization, resource access control and audience measurement. It vests a user with a Digital Calling Card (SM) which can be used for one ID, one password access to multiple web sites. It allows consumers to have credit, but remain anonymous, and respects privacy by requiring no central names database.

"Most important, TVS allows affiliated publishers and consumer billing agents such as ISPs, banks, telcos and retailers to make money -- by exchanging users and links just as wholesalers and retailers help each other execute physical commerce."

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Editor's Note: Open Market's news release may found at:
                        http://www.openmarket.com/releases/3patents.htm

                        Clickshare Service Corp.'s home page is at:
                        http://www.clickshare.com/

SOURCE: Clickshare Service Corp., 477 Congress Street, Portland ME 04101.
CONTACT: Bill Densmore, (413) 458-8001 / corp@clickshare.com