INDIVIDUAL Announces HeadsUp on AppleLink
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — November 8, 1993 — INDIVIDUAL Inc. announced today the immediate availability of HeadsUp, its personal, interactive daily news service, on Apple Computer's online service, AppleLink.
HeadsUp delivers a customized electronic report of timely, relevant news each work day to subscribers' AppleLink mailboxes. Similar to all AppleLink offerings, a complete folder of HeadsUp information is kept online through which customers can browse to learn more about the service and to order their trial subscription. INDIVIDUAL and Apple Online Services are offering these trials free for 30 days to introduce HeadsUp to the AppleLink community.
Each daily issue of HeadsUp includes only the most relevant news for each subscriber. INDIVIDUAL's patent-pending text retrieval system searches over 10,000 articles per day from more than 300 domestic and international sources to match significant stories with subscribers' unique profiles. Subscribers create their personal HeadsUp profiles by selecting 5-10 topics from a library of over 700 distinct topic categories spanning the high-technology, telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, energy, automotive, and defense industries.
"By offering the HeadsUp service to our 60,000 AppleLink customers, we are extending our commitment to provide ongoing value to our users worldwide," said Peter Friedman, director of Apple Online Services. "HeadsUp adds measureable value to AppleLink by providing easy access to customized news."
HeadsUp arrives in a compact, easy-to-read electronic format. Selected news items are presented as news "briefs," 1-2 sentence capsules of the articles meant to take readers immediately to the heart of the story. If they want to know more, readers can call, via an 800-number, INDIVIDUAL's interactive system to order the full text of any brief(s) on-demand. The full articles, like the daily issues, are sent within 30 minutes to their AppleLink mailboxes.
The price of the HeadsUp service is $39.95 per month, including 1 full-text article retrieval. An annual option of $795 per year is also available which includes 160 full-text retrievals. Additional article retrievals cost $4.95 each.
"We're pleased to be delivering HeadsUp to Apple's rapidly growing online community," said Yosi Amram, INDIVIDUAL's president and CEO. "Working with Apple has solidified HeadsUp as the standard in customized news for mobile knowledge workers." INDIVIDUAL has already announced HeadsUp agreements with major PDA vendors and wireless network providers.
Apple Online Services is Apple's information services business unit and currently provides commercial information services such as AppleLink and AppleLink CD to 60,000 subscribers in 52 countries around the world. Apple is planning to aggressively grow its electronic services business through design and development of value-added services. Future services are slated for inclusion with Macintosh personal computers, products in the Newton family, and other personal digital assistants.
With over 20,000 users, INDIVIDUAL is the leading provider of smart, interactive newspapers uniquely customized to each subscriber's specific interests. INDIVIDUAL's electronic newspapers are created by a proprietary (patent pending) technology driven by SMART, a self-learning filtering system developed at Cornell University. Daily issues are delivered in the subscriber's medium of choice: fax; electronic mail; into groupware platforms; or over wireless networks.
The company's First! product, a comprehensive, full-text service, is used by corporations to institutionalize current awareness among their key managers. HeadsUp is a personal service, providing the day's news in a snap-shot format and offering the option to interactively order full-text articles on-demand. INDIVIDUAL has established alliances with prominent information technology leaders including Dialog, Motorola, MCI, AT&T, Lotus, and the Gartner Group.
INDIVIDUAL is headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., with offices in Burlingame, Calif. and Oxfordshire, U.K.
CONTACT:
INDIVIDUAL Inc.
Rich Vancil/Jim Leightheiser, 617/354-2230, ext. 403/303
or
Apple Computer Inc.
Lynda Lucero, 408/974-7899