Eastern European reader pen - new venture for C Technologies

Eastern European reader pen - new venture for C Technologies Lund-based listed company, C Technologies, is now moving into the eastern European market. C Technologies, in partnership with ABBYY Software House, a Russian OCR*-system and character recognition software development company, is about to launch a new version of its reader pen. The C-Pen 600MX, as it will be known, is integrated with the electronic dictionary, Lingvo, (Russian-English-Russian) and scanning quality has been improved over previous versions. The pen will be distributed in Russia by Galaxy Computers Company, with the launch taking place as early as February this year. The C-Pen 600MX is the result of a year-long partnership with the Russian software company, ABBYY, based in Moscow. The new reader pen can translate from English to Russian and vice versa. Ongoing negotiations with dictionary publishers will also enable the translation of Czech, Polish and Hungarian to English, and vice versa. "We are delighted by our current partnership with ABBYY, which probably has the world's best character recognition software, as it is very much in line with C Technologies' desire to be the best when it comes to image processing. The economic growth in the eastern European countries has led to a rapidly expanding IT sector and the market is consequently already ready for this product. The technical competence of the people of the eastern European countries is getting better and better, and as a result, they are increasingly looking for hi-tech products, which means the potential for a breakthrough by C Technologies' products in this new market is excellent," says Mats Lindoff, President and CEO of C Technologies AB. "C Technologies is a creative, dynamic and forward-looking company. C-Pen is based on a brilliant idea and its design is perfect. It's not every day you come across such a high-quality partner as C Technologies. We view this opportunity to work alongside them as proof of our success," says Sergey Andreev, CEO of ABBYY Software House. "C Technologies integrates dictionaries from the most highly reputed publishing companies worldwide, such as Oxford, Merriam-Webster and Norstedts, into its reader pen. We regard the fact that Lingvo's electronic dictionary will now be joining the C-Pen dictionary ranks as an important market endorsement," says Anna Yermolayeva, Lingvo's Project Manager at ABBYY Software House. The new version of C-Pen - 600MX- that will be sold in Russia includes an integration of the Russian company's text recognition system, "FineReader OCR-system," and the electronic dictionary, Lingvo, produced by ABBYY. ABBYY and C Technologies announced the start of the process of integrating "FineReader" into C-Pen one year ago. That integration process is now complete. The next stage in the "Russification" of the C-Pen 600MX reader pen involved the integration of the Lingvo electronic dictionary. There are 62,000 words in the English-Russian section and 50,000 in the Russian-English one. Together with ABBYYs OCR the result became a usable, mobile dictionary. Lingvo is a large and very well-known brand-name in Russia. The C-Pen 600MX has the capacity to scan in 2,000 pages of text which can then be saved as a file in the pen, or alternatively, transferred directly to the computer via an infrared port (IR) or cable. The built-in digital camera photographs the text and the system then converts the picture into text. For additional information, please contact: Mats Lindoff Sergey Andreev President CEO C Technologies AB ABBYY Software House Tel: +46 46 540 10 05 Tel: +7 095 234 4400 e-mail: ml@cpen.com Fax: +1 888 467 4151 e-mail:Sergey_A@abbyy.com Anna Yermolayeva Birgitta Plyhm Project Manager, Lingvo Information Director ABBYY Software House C Technologies AB Tel: +7 095 243 4400 Mobile: +46 702 07 36 32 e-mail: birgitta.plyhm@bpinfo.se C Technologies AB (publ) is a young, Swedish IT-company with cutting-edge expertise within the fields of digital camera technology, image processing, and digital pens. The Company's primary product is the C-Pen scanning pen, which has received several important international awards for best IT product. The C-Pen scans, stores, processes, and wirelessly transmits text to a PC. The pen can also translate, send e-mail, SMS, and facsimiles, and read barcodes. Today, the C Technologies Group with its head office in Lund, Sweden, employs about 200 people. Major shareholders include Company founder Christer Fåhraeus, State Street Bank, Ericsson Mobile Communications and SEB Fonder. C Technologies is listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange (O-list, Attract 40). For further information: www.ctechnologies.se; www.cpen.com The ABBYY Group comprises ABBYY Software House (Moscow), ABBYY USA (Fremont, CA), ABBYY Ukraine (Kiev) and ABBYY Europe (Munich, Germany). ABBYY Software House has specialised in the development of software for OCR*, ICR*, dictionaries, semantics and electronic dictionaries. ABBYY´s products include the FineReader series of OCR/ICR/OMR* software - tools for automatically inputting text, tables and forms into computers, FineReader Development Tools, which enable the user to integrate OCR into their own solutions, and ABBYY Retrieval & Morpholog Engine - SDK*- a development tool that enables ABBYY's technology to be used in other software products. FineReader 4.0/5.0 received 35 awards from leading IT magazines worldwide. Siemens Nixdorf, Samsung Electronics, Sumitomo Electric Systems, L&H/Kurzweil, Bantec (Japan), Visionshape, Jet Fax, NewSoft, Primax and Microtek are all companies that have licensed the ABBY OCR/ICR technology. For further information: www.abbyy.com Galaxy Computers has been operating in the Russian market since 1996. The company is an exclusive distributor of palmtop computers in Russia and the OECD countries. Galaxy Computers has an extensive network of customers throughout Russia. For further information: www.psion.aha.ru * OCR = Optical Character Recognition * ICR= Intelligent Character Recognition * OMR= Optical Mark Reading * SDK= Software Development Kit ------------------------------------------------------------ This information was brought to you by BIT http://www.bit.se The following files are available for download: http://www.bit.se/bitonline/2001/02/06/20010206BIT00470/bit0001.doc http://www.bit.se/bitonline/2001/02/06/20010206BIT00470/bit0002.pdf