WILLIAMSTOWN, MA, Feb. 21, 2001 - Clickshare Service Corp., the transaction infrastructure for marketing digital goods, today announced that four separate daily newspapers have adopted the company's technology for selling their news content via the Internet. Ranging from New England to Texas and Kansas, the daily newspapers are participating in a new virtual marketplace for the material that appears in their print editions.

The latest customers to adopt Clickshare's service include Foster's Daily Democrat, of Dover, NH; the Concord [NH] Monitor; the Corpus Christi [TX] Caller-Times; and the Lawrence [Kansas] Journal-World.

Clickshare is establishing an exchange concept for digital content, analogous to exchanges that serve other focused communities ranging from stocks to auto parts. Clickshare President Nell Fields said these exchanges can have benefits to both sellers and buyers of digital content.

"Far beyond enabling the purchase of individual articles or enhanced content," Fields explained, "customers can use the exchange to purchase digital content from other businesses, including books, audio, video, even movies. Using Clickshare keeps the local publisher in total control of the registered membership/subscriber relationship, yet will eventually provide local customers anonymous, secure access to a world of content and commerce from a single account."

Earlier this year, the Sioux City (IA) Journal and Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News Service launched a separate pilot to test the market for editorial content in cyberspace. While the primary motivation in selling premium content is typically to enhance service to existing customers, the Sioux City Journal, like the newspapers adopting Clickshare today, believes the relationship will allow them to emerge as multimedia content resources for their readers, while protecting the subscription base for their print editions.

Phillip W. Calvert, vice president of business development at Clickshare, said, "Newspapers have been both reading and reporting about the dot-com threat to their product, and then watching the meltdown. At the same time, they have been searching for a way to extend the local service they provide their own print readers. Clickshare has provided the answer. We are proud of the confidence these organizations have expressed in our service, and look forward to taking them into the new, exciting world of the digital exchange."

Clickshare's technology leverages three key strengths that newspapers bring to the online marketplace: brand awareness, customer loyalty, and valuable content. By Clickshare-enabling their content and users, Calvert added, "newspapers create new revenue streams by doing what they already know: extending their brand, loyalty, and content. Clickshare is one of those defining technologies that serves as a benchmark for best practices within the industry."

About Clickshare

                        The Clickshare Service™ is a customer exchange platform for privacy-protected purchasing of text, music, video, software and - potentially - physical goods. It allows a consumer to have one account at a most-trusted website and buy from other websites without having to pass around a credit-card number, register or give out personal information. 

Based in Williamstown, Mass., Clickshare is backed by Sawgrass Seacoast Investments Inc. and private investors, including the founder/chairman and former COO of PeopleSoft Inc., former executives of Knight-Ridder, Times-Mirror Co., Harris Corp. and The Reader alternative-weekly group. It has raised over $2 million in seed capital.

Clickshare licenses its technology free to content- and user-owning websites, much as credit cards work through banks and merchants, making money by taking a small cut of each sale that it brokers. It will point consumers to "home bases" where they can establish their single Clickshare-enabled buying account. To demonstrate the service, Clickshare has set up its own temporary "home base" service at http://home.clickshare.com.

Clickshare is not being marketed directly to consumers but rather to publishers and other content owners and to companies that want to offer a new service to their existing customers.  These include banks, phone and wireless carriers, portals and other e-commerce websites.

Contacts:

Edward Bride, 413-442-7718 [edbride@clickshare.com]

Bill Densmore, 413-458-8001 [densmore@clickshare.com]