Cold North Wind Inc. Gives MemorialsOnline.com Inc. Access to Digitized Death, Birth and Wedding Announcements

St. John’s, Newfoundland and Ottawa, Ontario - November 15, 2000 - MemorialsOnline.com Inc., of St. John’s and Ottawa-based Cold North Wind Inc. have entered a business partnership. Through this alliance, MemorialsOnline will gain access to death, birth and wedding announcements from thousands of North American newspapers, some dating back to 1750, as they are digitized in Cold North Wind’s Paper of Record™ project.

MemorialsOnline will carry this information via its product portals www.ObitOnline.com, www.BirthsOnline.com and www.Wed-Online.com. Through the Paper of Record™ partnership program, Cold North Wind has allowed MemorialsOnline access to its digital archives in return for a 15% equity position in the company.

“We are excited by the potential this provides us in obtaining our ultimate goal of becoming the world’s premier genealogy resource. When this archiving is complete, we will have over 200 million individual birth, death and wedding announcements archived on our site,” stated MemorialsOnline President, Robert Hiscock. “Imagine the resource this will provide people all over the world, who are researching their families’ roots.” According to Mr. Hiscock, his company has already archived over 120,000 death and birth announcements."

“We are pleased to extend our partnership program to MemorialsOnline.com” commented Cold North Wind CEO R.J. (Bob) Huggins. “MemorialsOnline’s access to the genealogy market makes it a good fit with Paper of Record™, which will be a treasure trove of historical information. We look forward to developing similar partnerships with other high quality content distributors in the future.”

Cold North Wind Inc.
Cold North Wind is a privately held company based in Ottawa, Canada. The company works with microfilm collections from libraries and microform houses, and with current newspaper chains to turn hard-to-access microfilm into high-resolution, searchable digital images. It employs state-of-the-art technology to improve the quality of images, to scan and OCR them, to build searchable full-text indexes and to publish the images to the Internet.The Paper of Record™ digital archive, now under development at Cold North Wind, is an Internet-based collection of searchable images of newspapers dating from the 1700s, presented in their original published form. The company operates as a business-to-business supplier of web-based information, working with large distribution portals serving the business, educational and consumer markets. Access to the Paper of Record™ archive will be available via subscription through participating Internet service providers, educational institutions, libraries, etc.

Cold North Wind announced the close of its investment seed round in May 2000, after securing $2 million in start-up funding for the new venture. Among the first-round investors was Bell & Howell Information and Learning (now in the process of being renamed “ProQuest”), a NYSE-listed company based in Skokie, Illinois with annual revenues approaching US$1 billion. In September 2000, Cold North Wind announced a C$7.65 million letter of intent with Torstar Corporation that includes both a service agreement and Torstar acquiring a ten percent equity position in Cold North Wind. Under the terms of the agreement, CNW will digitize the Toronto Star’s archives back to the paper’s beginning in 1892; the deal also includes digitizing Torstar’s other Southern Ontario dailies. The Toronto Star currently has the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in Canada.

Memorials Online.com Inc.
In addition to accessing birth, death and wedding announcements, visitors to www.MemorialsOnline.com have the opportunity to create a lasting Memorial Tribute for a loved one. This Memorial Tribute can be created online by answering a few simple questions, right in your browser. The memorial will be dynamically generated and will include such things as family history, biography, photographs and a guest book for each Memorial. MemorialsOnline.com is currently seeking US $5 million for first round investment. This investment will be used to launch a major North American marketing campaign and to further develop the sub webs of the planned portal site, www.MyRootsOnline.com.

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