Novartis Adopts Firepad Multimedia Software

Swiss drug giant Novartis has become the second Fortune 500 health care firm to buy Firepad software in bulk. Firepad's mobile application platform enables complex product demonstrations and multimedia customer education on even the most inexpensive Palm-compatible handhelds.

COSTA MESA, CALIF - January 15, 2004 - Firepad announced its second bulk sale to a Fortune 500 health care firm. Geneva-based drug giant Novartis (NASDAQ: NVS) will employ components of the Firepad Mobile Application Platform to bring image- and video-rich documents to its internal handheld users.

"In the past several months, we've seen interest surge in the drug and medical device arena," said Firepad CEO Bill Mitchell. "Most often, our firm supplies the mobile multimedia component of the overall field sales IT strategy."

Using Firepad and any Palm-compatible handheld, a sales team can carry detailed product demonstrations, sell sheets and customer education materials in a shirt pocket. These materials can then be referenced during sales calls, or even beamed to the prospect's PDA in lieu of take-aways.

"We first realized the customer education potential of the Firepad platform when General Motors approached us to deploy Firepad with all its Saab exhibitors at the 2002 Detroit Motor Show," said Mitchell.

Firepad software works with the IT staff's existing HTML, image and video tools to quickly create media-rich reference materials. Since documents are maintained in open standard formats, the IT organization maintains its options and avoids lock-in.

"Firepad's Palm media viewer is one of the top selling Palm applications to date," said Mitchell. "Despite this consumer-level ease of use, corporate IT teams enjoy the depth and integrative flexibility of the Firepad platform over simpler point solutions offered by other vendors. Deployments can include Firepad's web proxy server and video server, but need not; they can distribute content via either wireless, HotSync, or both; administration can be either centralized or distributed. Using the Firepad Software Developer Kit, the IT staff can even integrate Firepad's multimedia features into their own fully custom software projects. For years, we have provided a menu of extensions that other publishers haven't even thought about yet."

About Firepad

Firepad, based in Costa Mesa, California, makes and sells software to create and publish rich media for inexpensive, standard handheld devices. Firepad's client/server platform is the world's only system to employ standard HTML tools to generate and flexibly distribute multimedia documents containing zoomable images and streaming video.

More information about Firepad can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.firepad.com.

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For More Information, Contact:
Bill Mitchell
sales@firepad.com
(949) 387-7909