Jennifer Larson, Director of Marketing
Durand Communications, Inc.
Voice: 805-961-8700 ext. 221   Fax: 805-961-18701
E-mail: jennifer@durand.com

(SANTA BARBARA, CA)-Durand Communications, Inc. today announces the purchase of the assets required to maintain the online community, Electric Minds (www.minds.com.). Recently, bridge financing fell through for Electric Minds, leaving the company without the necessary funds required to capitalize on its latest online events successes. Now, Durand Communications has stepped forward to keep Electric Minds online and intact, with founder Howard Rheingold still actively involved with growing the community.

Durand Communications is a firm believer in electronic communities and has recently launched a complementary new site called CommunityWare (www.communityware.com). Under the current agreement, the two community services will remain separate entities, but will share in a common user registration process that seamlessly affords each service participant access to the other. In addition, the Electric Minds servers will be moved to Durand’s offices and Durand Communications will host the site.

Durand has made an investment in Electric Minds because they value the history and self-governing model that Rheingold has fostered. They value the Electric Minds’ model so much that Durand involved the Eminds community in their plans for the purchase by going online and engaging in a community discussion. Rheingold will participate within CommunityWare, helping to integrate many of the same social principles evolving within Electric Minds.

“Durand has always been a strong provider of the technology for community building on the Internet,” says Andre Durand, president and chief executive officer of Durand. “What Howard and Electric Minds bring to us is the content publishing and social elements which we believe to be very complimentary to our focus on commerce and sustaining community revenue models.”

“Durand’s vision of electronic communities is very similar to mine,” says Rheingold. “The Web is a social medium. Give people the tools to communicate with each other and sustain community, provide models of high quality conversation, help them govern themselves, and they will use the Web to build communities.”

Electric Minds was formed in Spring 1996 to realize a vision of the “social Web” - a large scale electronic community devoted to discussing science and technology, and their future effects on the global society.

CommunityWare is the first interactive Web site that hosts free public communities; and private communities at a nominal monthly fee. These communities can be created and easily managed by the community host (or creator). All communities offer interactive, two-way communications services (chat, live messaging, who’s live lists), groupware services (messaging, email, whiteboards and newsletters), electronic commerce capabilities through Wave Systems’ (NASDAQ: WAVX) WinPublisher application, homepage and Web site authoring, and management services and capabilities. No special software or proprietary browser is required. With only two months of full operation, more than 1,100 communities have been created and are now hosted on CommunityWare.