Tracy Bagatelle
THE TERPIN GROUP
Voice: (310) 821-6100, x108 Fax: (310) 577-9646
Email: tbagatelle@terpin.com

(SANTA BARBARA, CA) -Durand Communications, Inc. today announces a deal with Electric Minds creator, Howard Rheingold. Rheingold will be responsible for building and hosting the Host University, a private community designed to recruit, train and manage hosts for Durand’s virtual community service, CommunityWare (www.communityware.com). Rheingold will also be responsible for community consulting and arranging high-profile online events, as he did with IBM’s chess competition, Deep Blue vs. Kasparov.

Last month, Durand Communications purchased the assets required to maintain the Electric Minds community. At that time, no formal deal was signed with Rheingold and the two community services were to remain as separate entities. However, as of September 14, the contract between Electric Minds and its current conferencing platform expires, thus Durand will migrate the entire Electric Minds community to CommunityWare. Starting this month, Durand will begin beta-testing the new conferencing platform with selected Eminders. CommunityWare’s new conferencing platform integrates the best of Electric Minds’ current functionality and also provides Eminders with the enhanced communications capabilities of CommunityWare. Eminders will still access Electric Minds from www.minds.com. With the integration, CommunityWare will gain nearly 80,000 new users.

Durand made an investment in Electric Minds because it values the history and self-governing model that Rheingold has fostered. In his new role, Rheingold will participate within CommunityWare, helping to integrate many of the same social principles evolving within Electric Minds.

The Host University, led by Rheingold, includes a monthly budget to recruit, train and pay community hosts for CommunityWare and Electric Minds communities. Some graduates of the Host University will be paid to host Universal Communities under these categories: Education, Government, Consumer, Business and Special Interest Groups (SIGs). These paid hosts will be responsible for maintaining the community, moderating conferences, providing support to members of the community and attracting new members.

“As author of The Virtual Community and the creator of Electric Minds, Rheingold has demonstrated an unparalleled ability to build and manage virtual communities,” says Andre Durand, president and chief executive officer of Durand. “We believe his involvement in our new Host University will draw a lot of talent to CommunityWare, and we have faith that he will train the future hosts of CommunityWare to make their communities as vibrant and successful as the Electric Minds community.”

“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 and ultimately conduct transactions online.”

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, instant messaging, who’s live lists), groupware services (conferencing, 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.