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By Steve Horton
iProduction

ST. PAUL, July 12, 2001 -- Washington, DC-based SpeakOut.com, America's leading non-partisan Internet activism Web site and online opinion research company, has selected iProduction to provide Internet publishing systems for its redesigned Web site at www.speakout.com.

Launched in February 2000, SpeakOut.com's mission is to enhance the democratic process by enabling citizens to have a direct impact on the decisions that affect their lives. SpeakOut.com site visitors enjoy a wide variety of news and information tailored to their interests and activism tools allowing aggregated messaging to a vast array of public officeholders, candidates, business and news executives.

SpeakOut.com has also developed new patent pending online research technology called Ntercept.™ Ntercept, an Internet-enabled tool that allows thousands of users to simultaneously react to televised or Internet-streamed images, takes the traditional focus group on line. The resulting data stream shows participants' cumulative levels of approval or disapproval for each speech, commercial, image or audio segment with data that tracks to the individual words, phrases or visual images tested.

Steve Laliberte, iProduction's president, said SpeakOut.com chose iProduction because of the firm's ability to enable fewer editors to publish more content on the Web. "This is a complex site that is being operated by just a few editors and researchers", Laliberte said. "They needed a platform that would allow a small editorial staff to run the entire Web with no technical hassles."

iProduction will provide SpeakOut.com with Internet publishing applications, host systems, bandwidth, security, and related Web development services. The dollar value of the contract between the two companies was not disclosed.

iProduction was founded by Steve Laliberte in 1994. Mr. Laliberte has been involved with on-line information services since 1977, beginning his career in publishing with McGraw-Hill. He has developed and implemented dozens of Web operations for publishers and FORTUNE 500 companies and publishers such as The Washington Post, The Star Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The Orange County Register, Dell Computers, Novell, NCS Pearson, and Target.

iProduction's core product is a suite of Internet applications that help publishers manage online editorial, issues, volumes, content archives, classified and display advertising, syndication, subscriptions, and other components of the Internet publishing business. The system allows editors rather than programmers to run Web sites on their own with minimal training, thus greatly reducing or eliminating altogether the publisher's need to hire Web programmers and buy computers and software.

iProduction is located at 3570 Lexington Avenue North in St. Paul, Minnesota.