I.R.I.S. releases the I.R.I.S. Business Card Reader II, a powerful business card organizer that converts business cards into electronic address books

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1 PRESS RELEASE Brussels, May Embargo until May at 5:40 p.m. I.R.I.S. releases the I.R.I.S. Business Card Reader II, a powerful business card organizer that converts business cards into electronic address books It s the only business card organizer that recognizes business cards from 50 different countries! Offers powerful contact management tools Exports contacts to and synchronizes with contact managers, databases, Pocket PC and Palm handheld computers etc. Brussels, May I.R.I.S. Group, a publicly traded Belgian company (Euronext Brussels: IRI), market leader in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), form reading, Electronic Document Management (EDM), archiving and storage, today announces the worldwide availability of the I.R.I.S. Business Card Reader II, a comprehensive solution that transforms business cards into a contact database. These last years, I.R.I.S. has developed and marketed worldwide a wide range of OCR products to convert paper documents such as business reports, magazines, books, faxes, newspapers, etc. into computer-editable text files that can be easily stored and shared. Thanks to the success of its state-ofthe-art technology, I.R.I.S. became a leading company on the OCR market. Today, I.R.I.S. announces the major release of the I.R.I.S. Business Card Reader II (for Windows PCs), a completely renewed solution that combines a specialized business card scanner (IBCR-II) with the Cardiris 3.0 software, a business card organizer.

2 The IBCR-II business card scanner The dedicated color scanner has a small footprint and allows the user to scan business cards wherever he may be. The scanner connects to your computer via the USB port: some plug-and-play suffices to start the scanning. The brand new Cardiris 3.0 software Cardiris 3.0 is a totally revised of I.R.I.S. business card organizer. Fast and accurate, Cardiris now recognizes business cards from up to 50 different countries, a unique feat! In seconds, Cardiris analyzes the information the business cards contain and send sit to the appropriate data fields company name, name, title, address, , web site etc. to create an electronic address book.

3 Thanks to the efficient search and select tools, the daily management of your contacts becomes very easy: you find rapidly your contact person even with very little information. Indeed, you can easily see Cardiris as your electronic Rolodex! Cardiris comes with an extensive import, export and synchronization module. The contacts can be exported to and imported from other applications such as contact managers, databases, personal information managers ( PIMs ), spreadsheets and even word processors (whose mail merge function allows to print letters, envelopes and labels). Not that those contact databases have to stored on a PC you can exchange data with your Pocket PC or Palm handheld computers as well

4 Addressing the market The I.R.I.S. Business Card Reader II is an ideal productivity tool for: Businessmen and secretaries who handle a lot of business cards. Instead of archiving paper business cards, they update their electronic address book in seconds and can share their contacts with colleagues. Companies with a boot on a fair: when they face a lot of visitors on their booth, they just scan their business cards. Later on, they recognize entire batches of scanned cards automatically and generate labels for a follow-up mailing. Professionals, freelancers and home users who want to keep up-todate their professional and personal address book. And they can scan photos and share them with friends and family members. Says Pierre de Muelenaere, CEO and president of I.R.I.S. group: We are very delighted to introduce the I.R.I.S. Business Card Reader II. It s a unique productivity tool that recognizes business cards from 50 different countries! That means the IBCR-II will help professional and private users from all over the world to keep their electronic address book up-to-date. The IBCR-II will strengthen our leading position as a developer of OCR products and will allow us to penetrate further the Document to Knowledge market. Major features of the I.R.I.S. Business Card Reader II New user interface A new and intuitive user interface guides you through the main functions of the IBCR II and helps you to: - Recognize your business cards - Manage your contact database - Import, export and synchronize your contacts Business card recognition An optimized OCR ("Optical Character Recognition") engine converts your scanned business cards rapidly and accurately into database records. You obtain a comprehensive address book with electronic contacts and color images of your business cards. After the scanning, the business cards are processed by Cardiris, the I.R.I.S. business card organizer software, which offers the following features: - Automatic orientation of the business cards

5 - Automatic deskewing and cropping - State-of-the-art field analysis - Zoom to see details of the card images Foreign country support Very accurate and fast, Cardiris 3 recognizes business cards from up to 50 different countries! Cardiris processes cards from all over the world from North and South America, Eastern and Western Europe, the Baltic countries, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Australia and much more. And when a country is not directly supported by Cardiris, you can drag-anddrop the data to the data fields using on-the-fly OCR. Batch OCR Recognize entire batches of business cards with Cardiris: the recognition is fast and accurate as a single operation applies to an entire range of cards! Drag-and-drop names, s and web sites With simple drag-and-drop operations, the user can select a piece of information on the business card image and drag it to the right data field: the OCR gets executed on the fly! Optionally, you can support 4 Asian countries thanks to the Asian BCR addon : Japan, Korea, P.R. China (Simplified Chinese) and Taiwan (Traditional Chinese). Color scanning, storage and display The dedicated business card scanner is a 600 dpi color scanner. You can scan, store and display your business cards in color, grayscale and blackand-white. Send s and browse directly from Cardiris A simple click on the address in the database allows the user to create a new . A simple click on the web address launches Internet Explorer directly to the page. Contact database Cardiris comprises its own database and offers useful tools to search, select and export contacts.

6 New, indexed and verified cards Business cards have three different statuses to allow the user a fast validation of the recognized data. New cards: any scanned and recognized business card is new until the company name has been validated by the user. Indexed cards: any contact with a validated company name. Indexed cards can be safely searched by the company name. Verified cards: any data field of a verified card has been validated. The user can now export and synchronize the business cards! Search and selection tools Any contact can be retrieved instantly: thanks to free-text searching, you re bound to find your contact person back very quickly - even with very little information to go on, say, part of his first name. You can use query by example searching that uses specific data fields. Contact printing If you want to organize a mailing or get an overview of your contact list, the printing feature gets you organized: Cardiris directly prints address lists and labels. All popular label formats (Avery and NEBS) are supported. Export and import your contacts (including the images) Thanks to the export-import function, you can update your address book in the most popular contact managers and in Cardiris. Or export your contacts in the vcard and HTML format or as comma delimited text. The color images of your business cards can be included in the export! Powerful synchronization Cardiris synchronizes with the most popular contact databases Pocket PC and Palm handheld devices, Microsoft Outlook, Symantec Act!, Lotus Notes and GoldMine. It takes but a few clicks to update the contents of your electronic address book with the latest information. Availability and price The I.R.I.S. Business Card Reader will be available end of May 2003 in the distribution and retail channels in Europe, in the USA and in Asia. The product will also be sold on I.R.I.S. online shop. The IBCR-II can be acquired in computer stores for 199 (SRP Suggested Retail Price, VAT included).

7 About I.R.I.S. Image Recognition Integrated Systems (I.R.I.S.), a Belgian company founded in 1987 and listed on Euronext Brussels (ticker code: IRI), is a leader on the OCR ( Optical Character Recognition ) market, the form reading and the Electronic Document Management markets. The I.R.I.S. activities are handled by two divisions: Office Products & Technologies I.R.I.S. develops and markets worldwide a complete range of OCR applications for home and office users. Its well-known products are: IRISPen II: a pen scanner that allows text and figures capture in any application at the stroke of a hand. The pen scanner is available in the Standard version (reads text and figures) and Executive version (reads text, figures, handprinted numbers, barcodes and includes a text-to-speech module). Readiris Pro: an OCR package for flatbed scanners, all-in-one devices and digital cameras. Readiris Pro recognizes colour documents in up to 93 different languages, sends the recognition results directly to Word or Excel, saves the OCR results in the best known formats including HTML, and supports PDF format. To date, more than 8 million copies have been sold. Readiris Pro has been selected by Hewlett-Packard, Agfa and Compaq, Panasonic etc. I.R.I.S. Business Card Reader and Cardiris: a complete hardware and software solution to scan, index and recognize business cards. Your contacts are easily exported to your PDA s or contact database with a single click export to Outlook or the export options of Cardiris. IRISPdf: the professional solution to generate fully searchable color, grayscale and black-and-white Adobe Acrobat PDF files. Professional Systems I.R.I.S. also offers solutions for the professional user to de-materialize paper documents, share and distribute the documents over the Intranet/Extranet/Internet and archive and store the electronic documents. The main solutions are: Automatic Document Reading (ADR) and Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR): document capture of forms (ADR) and non-structured documents (IDR) in paper or electronic formats. Electronic Document Management (EDM): organizing, indexing, querying and sharing of electronic documents. Knowledge Management: high-level consulting services to organize, preserve and optimally use the collective knowledge present in a company. Enterprise Information Portals: development and implementation of integrated portals based on I.R.I.S. DocShare for professional associations and large-scale companies. Archiving and Data storage: design, architecture and installation of storage, archiving and electronic data security solutions. I.R.I.S. Group had a sales figure of in I.R.I.S. has more than 240 employees based in Louvain-la-Neuve and Brussels (Belgium), Massy and Rueil-Malmaison (France), Luxembourg and Delray Beach (Florida, USA). For more information on our company, our solutions or our products, visit the I.R.I.S. web site at

8 How to get more information I.R.I.S. Europe Headquarters Press contact: Catherine Rochigneux Tel: 32 (0) Fax: 32 (0) Journalists can register on the I.R.I.S. Extranet web site by clicking on the link They will receive a personal login and password to access the Extranet web site where more corporate and product information is available.