BASIS TECHNOLOGY BECOMES FULL MEMBER OF THE UNICODE CONSORTIUM

Cambridge, MA, November 8, 1999—Basis Technology, the leading provider of internationalization technology for software publishers, e-businesses, and global enterprises, announced today that it has become a full member of the Unicode Consortium. Basis Technology’s increased support for the Consortium strengthens its leadership position in the software internationalization field, where it is already known for Rosette, its C++ Library for Unicode, and computational linguistic products based on the Unicode Standard.

“We are pleased to join other software industry leaders in supporting the activities of the Unicode Consortium,” said Carl Hoffman, President of Basis Technology. “Our business has grown rapidly due to widespread interest in the Unicode Standard, and it is appropriate that we increase our level of financial support for the Consortium and take a more active role as a voting member in its future directions.”

“The Unicode Consortium welcomes Basis Technology as its newest full member,” said Mark Davis, President of the Consortium. “Basis Technology is on the leading edge of globalizing the Internet, and will make valuable contributions to the further development of the Unicode Standard.”

The Unicode Standard is a uniform, universal character set which has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Sybase, and many others. Unicode is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646, and is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc. It is supported in many operating systems and all modern browsers. The emergence of the Unicode Standard and the availability of tools supporting it, are among the most significant recent technology trends in the area of global software development.

Software that is Unicode-compliant enables processing of any written language used in the modern world. Incorporating Unicode into client-server or multi-tiered applications and multilingual websites offers dramatic cost savings over the use of legacy character sets. Unicode enables a single software product or a single website to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and locales without re-engineering.

Basis Technology joined the Unicode Consortium as an associate member in 1998, and co-sponsored the 14th and 15th International Unicode Conferences, both held in 1999. Basis will co-sponsor the upcoming 16th International Unicode Conference (IUC16) planned for March 27-30, 2000, in Amsterdam, Holland.

About the Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend, and promote use of the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in modern software products and standards. The membership of the Consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations in the computer and information processing industry. The Consortium is supported financially solely through membership dues. Membership in the Unicode Consortium is open to organizations and individuals anywhere in the world who support the Unicode Standard and wish to assist in its extension and implementation.

The Consortium’s office is located in Cupertino, California. For more information, see www.unicode.org or call 408-777-3721.

About Basis Technology
Basis Technology is the leading provider of internationalization technology and services to software publishers, Internet companies, and global enterprises. The company specializes in software re-engineering services for Unicode compliance, and offers a wide range of cross-platform software components that deliver off-the-shelf solutions to problems commonly encountered in internationalization projects.

Basis Technology’s staff of multilingual project managers, software engineers, testers, and translators are veterans of more than one hundred software and Web internationalization projects. The company enables its customers to minimize the cost and risk of expanding into global markets.

Company headquarters are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a branch office in Tokyo, Japan. For more information, visit www.basistech.com or call 617-386-2000.