ABBYY ANNOUNCES WORLDWIDE BUNDLING AGREEMENT WITH AVIGRAMM TECHNOLOGY.

ABBYY FineReader 4.0 Sprint Software is Supplied with All Avigramm Scanners Worldwide, Including the Recently Announced Macintosh Scanners.

Fremont, CA, USA, January 24, 2000 ¡ ABBYY USA (a member of the ABBYY Group) today announced a bundling agreement with Avigramm Technology Corporation. Under the agreement, Avigramm Technology will bundle ABBYY's FineReader 4.0 Sprint OCR with all Avigramm scanners worldwide, including the recently announced Macintosh Scanners. 
ôWe are pleased to offer MiniDoc portable scanner users the most powerful OCR solution on the market,ö said James Gan, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Avigramm Technology. "We chose FineReader 4.0 Sprint software because its superior OCR accuracy, ease of use and outstanding result in converting poor quality documents."

ôWe are proud to be chosen by Avigramm Technology as a strategic partner to bundle ABBYY FineReader 4.0 Sprint with MiniDoc scanners for PC and Mac environments," said Sergey Andreyev, CEO of ABBYY Software House. "The partnership between our companies will benefit AvigrammÆs customers all over the world." 

ABBYY FineReader 4.0 Sprint is based upon the worldÆs leading OCR, ABBYY FineReader Engine. The same family products ABBYY FineReader 4.0 Standard/Professional received 20 awards from the leading IT magazines worldwide as of January 2000. FineReader has easy-to-learn standard Windows interface available in 10 languages, and recognizes documents in û 53 languages. FineReader 4.0 Sprint supports one-button OCR (ôScan&Readö); and exports recognition results directly into MS Word, MS Excel, WordPerfect, and Word Pro or in RTF or TXT formats. 

FineReader's powerful OCR engine is more accurate than competing OCR systems. The softwareÆs Integral Purposeful Adaptive (IPA) perception technology uses new structural pattern algorithm of character recognition alongside with other widely known algorithms: feature and raster classifiers. Using these algorithms and expertise in the morphology increases recognition accuracy on even poor quality documents (such as those created by dot-matrix printers, typewriters, photocopiers, and fax machines) to an unprecedented level. 

Users of FineReader 4.0 Sprint can save up to $140 USD by upgrading FineReader Sprint to FineReader Standard (or FineReader Professional). ABBYY FineReader Standard/Professional allows users to export recognition results directly to MS Word, MS Excel, Word Perfect, and Word Pro or save in RTF, TXT, DOC, CSV, XLS, DBF, PDF or HTML formats and more.

Avigramm Technology Corporation was founded in 1997 and is primarily geared toward the development of Internet-related Audio, Video, Image, and Graphics products. The company also released the MiniDoc scanner, the worldÆs first portable USB scanner with a rechargeable battery built-in. The Scanner is targeted to the Windows and Macintosh consumer markets, and was designed in unique crystal Blue, Orange, Red, and White colors.

Other products to be introduced to the market in the year 2000 are the MiniClip û the smallest USB Video Capture device in the market -- and a portable Internet fax scanner device. Avigramm has over 30 employees working in product development, with international offices in Cologne, Germany and San Jose, California. Avigramm does business in pure OEM/ODM and also does private brand label for international customers in Japan, China, Spain, Italy, USA and others. For more information about Avigramm, visit the companyÆs web-site at www.avigramm.com.tw

ABBYY USA is a member of the ABBYY Group, which publishes and distributes ABBYYÆs products in North America. ABBYY (ABBYY Software House) specializes in the development of software for optical character recognition (OCR), intelligent character recognition (ICR), linguistics, semantics, and electronic lexicography. ABBYY's products include: the FineReader line of OCR/ICR/OMR software, which allows the automatic input of texts, tables and forms into a computer; FineReader Development Tools, which allows developers to integrate OCR into their solutions and others. ABBYY licenses OCR/ICR technologies to Acer, Siemens Nixdorf, Samsung Electronics, Sumitomo Electric Systems, L&H/Kurzweil, Arkenstone, Banctec (Japan), Visionshape, Jet Fax, NewSoft, Prime Recognition and Primax. For more information about ABBYY, visit the companyÆs web-site at www.abbyy.com.

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