Riff News

KANSMEN CORPORATION ANNOUNCES A NEW, COMPLETE EDUCATION PROGRAM FOR ITS LITTLEBROTHER INTERNET BLOCKING SOFTWARE

As more and more students have access to the Internet from a networked environment, it is increasingly important to protect them from accessing sex, drug and hate sites and to preclude reaching chat groups where predators lie in wait.

July 10, 1998 - Milpitas, California - Phil Lumish, Vice President of sales and marketing for Kansmen Corporation today announced a new program that is directed at making it easier for K- 12 schools to get LittleBrother Professional software so they can protect their students from accessing Internet sites that are inappropriate.

Ever since LittleBrother was introduced in December of 1996, it has generated a lot of interest in schools across the country with a number of them licensing the software. The ability of LittleBrother to block access to specific web sites, games and chat groups by URL and key word, has made it an important addition to the software collections of schools and libraries.

Now that the issue of Internet access has become increasingly important with more and more schools adding this to their classroom and lab networks, Kansmen feels that they should make access to LittleBrother easier than ever before.

The new Education Program includes:

1. Identifying the education buying or recommending authority in every state.
2. Identifying those states that are making buying decisions for all of the schools, which states are making recommendations only and which states have not yet decided what they are going to do.
3. Once the identification and qualification are made, Kansmen will GIVE each state a 100 user copy of LittleBrother Professional. This will be used for recommendation and evaluation purposes and can be used by the state office to monitor their own operations.
4. For those states that delegate the decision process to the district or county level, Kansmen will make contact with all of the districts' officials that are involved with this process and offer them a FREE copy of LittleBrother Professional, this time for 25 users.
5. Kansmen will determine what districts delegate the buying decisions to the individual schools and then approach these directly.

The key part of the new program to make LittleBrother as easy as possible to buy, is a dramatic reduction in the pricing structure:

• If the sale is made at the state level, the cost to the state is $1 per student computer that is being used to access the Internet. There is no minimum but Kansmen will expect to deliver licenses on a district by district or school by school basis. In the case where the number of students is exceptionally high, discounts may be available.
• If the sale is made at the district level, the cost to the district is $4 per student computer that is being used to access the Internet. There is no minimum but Kansmen will expect to deliver licenses on a school by school basis.
• If the sale is made at the school level the cost to the school is $12 per student computer that is being used to access the Internet with the potential for discounting this price based on the actual number of students at each school.
• The initial license fee includes 6 months of database updates and any software upgrades during that timeframe.
• Annual maintenance renewals after the initial 6 months are 20% of the license fee per year but if this is purchased at the time of the initial order, this is reduced to 15%.
• If the buyers are willing to commit to 2 or more years of maintenance at the time of the initial purchase, the annual renewal fee is only 10% and Kansmen will accept up to 3 years of maintenance at that time. If the buyers want to have multiple years of maintenance coverage but don't make the decision at the time of purchase, Kansmen will reduce the cost to 15% of the initial license fee.

This program officially began on July 1, 1998

Kansmen will be working with the various agencies, districts and schools directly and through a select group of resellers.

Kansmen Corporation has been in business since 1991 and in addition to the LittleBrother product, it offers network management software to improve ISDN monitoring and to complement the use of Novell's Managewise product. The company will be introducing new products in the 4th quarter of 1998 designed to increase the efficiency of access to a users' web site.