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Press Release

Oct 2, 1996

Vicinity Corp.'s Web-Based Driving Directions Service Is Now Live On Customer Web Sites

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Vicinity Corp.'s Web-Based Driving Directions Service Is Now Live On Customer Web SitesSUNNYVALE, CA -- October 2, 1996 -- Vicinity Corporation, the leading supplier of GeoEnabled™ content and services for the World Wide Web, (http://www.vicinity.com) today announced the immediate availability of its web-based YourTown™ Driving Directions service. With this announcement, Vicinity becomes the only company to offer comprehensive, door-to-door, turn-by-turn driving directions for intra-city and inter-city, in metropolitan areas across the United States. Driving Directions can be integrated with a range of national directory and information services, such as yellow pages, travel guides and more. Leading web sites such as Yahoo! and Travelocity are now subscribing to this service, enabling consumers who surf the web to quickly locate a business or retail destination and accurately plan their route from anywhere they happen to be in a given area. "Vicinity's Driving Directions offer web publishers the potential for immediate increase in traffic on their web sites, and powerful new options for their advertisers," said Hal Logan, president and CEO of Vicinity Corporation. "Driving Directions are a prime example of the compelling services that can be created by applying Vicinity's geographical filtering technology to the web."

About Driving Directions
Driving Directions is a new and powerful component of Vicinity's YourTown™ family of GeoEnabled services for web publishers, corporate web sites and web advertisers. Driving Directions provide users with a set of instructions that includes a mini map, or maplett, for each turn to guide them from their point of origin to their intended destination. While other companies offer driving directions on the web, they are only from city-to city, and some only offer limited door-to-door directions within a limited selection of cities. With Vicinity's Driving Directions, users can request a preferred route such as: the fastest/shortest, or freeway/surface streets, or walking/biking routes and door-to-door driving instructions will be given accordingly. A complete map is provided at the conclusion of the turn-by-turn directions with the chosen route highlighted.

Live on Customer Web Sites
Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) announced today its expanded Yellow Pages service, a feature of Vicinity's YourTown family of GeoEnabling services, that lets users not only search for a specific business from Vicinity's database of 16 million listings, but to "browse" for the business closest to them using logical, intuitive categories. In addition, Yahoo! Yellow Pages will now include the ability to produce maps with driving directions to any chosen destination. Yahoo! will demonstrate this expanded service today, including the Driving Directions capabilities, at the Yellow Pages Publisher's Association's annual conference in Florida. The Yahoo! Yellow Pages Services will go on-line for public use October 7, 1996 and will be located on Yahoo!'s front page for immediate access. "Yahoo!, in partnership with Vicinity, has created one of the Internet's most popular interactive Yellow Pages," said Jeff Mallett, senior vice president of business operations at Yahoo! "Continuing to improve upon Yahoo!'s already popular services reflects our ongoing committment to providing users with the best resources and content available today."

Travelocity (http://www.travelocity.com) is a leading travel web site that offers consumers "one-stop" shopping for planning their vacation and business travel. It recently added Driving Directions to its selection of services; the directions can be accessed easily in the Destinations & Interest section on Travelocity's web site. Travelocity enables its customers to research travel destinations, airline schedules and fares, hotel and car reservations and more. "By adding the Driving Directions to our vast library of travel services we are enabling consumers to pinpoint venues or activities quickly, easily and accurately," said Neal Checkoway, president and CEO of Worldview Systems Corporation, co-creator with SABRE Interactive of Travelocity. "Customers needing directions to a particular retailer, or for the business/vacation traveler unfamiliar with a new city, can now search for a location closest to them and obtain a detailed route with both text and visual maps."

About YourTown
Vicinity's YourTown family of services provide web publishers, corporate web sites and advertisers with a geographically oriented choice of information services that can be customized to the look and feel of individual web sites. These services include GeoEnabled directories that can integrate millions of business sites, landmarks and other locations that define an audience's community of geography or interest; proximity searches that enable users to find a specific business nearest to their home or business location, and door-to-door driving directions that provide in-depth directions to a targeted destination, advertising functionality and more.

About Vicinity Corporation
Established in August of 1995, Vicinity Corporation is the leading supplier of GeoEnabled, or geographically oriented, content and services for the World Wide Web. The company licenses its YourTown family of services to leading web search and directory services, travel services, Yellow Pages providers, newspapers, and other businesses who brand the Vicinity services with their own company look, feel and attitude. Vicinity also offers MapBlast! its free, interactive mapping service that enables end-users to generate a digital map for U.S. locations, embed it in a Web page or email it to others. Vicinity has expanded into the European markets to offer high quality, detailed, interactive, web-based maps for most of continental Europe. For more information, users can access the company's web site at http://www.vicinity.com, or contact its corporate office at 408/732-5940.

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YourTown, MapBlast! and GeoEnabled are trademarks of Vicinity Corporation.Vicinity is a trademark of Vicinity Corporation. All other names are properties of their respective holders.