New e-learning Partnership Aims to Empower Legal Training Professionals

(London 05/11/03) - Today Semple Piggot Rochez (Legal Education) Ltd (SPR) , the award winning multimedia legal training specialists, announced a strategic partnership with Impatica Inc, the industry leading e-learning software developer, that establishes SPR as the exclusive provider of Impatica products to the UK legal market.

Impatica is a brand new software package that enables training professionals to quickly and easily convert a flat PowerPoint presentation into an effective and compelling multimedia learning experience.

As is well known, the main drawback with PowerPoint is that adding audio or video vastly increases the size of the file so that delivery via internet or intranet is impossible. Impatica takes Powerpoint content, including video and audio, and massively compresses it (down to between 1 and 15% of its original size) so that it can be delivered using standard HTML and a small Java stream. This means that so long as Java is enabled on the client computer, Impatica presentations will be readable without the need for third party specialist plug-ins or potentially invasive media applications and without the attendant firewall problems.

The Impatica package comprises two applications: Impatica for PowerPoint and Impatica on Cue, both of which are completely intuitive and require absolutely no prior knowledge or specialist skills to use.

Impatica for PowerPoint is the base application that merely compresses or ‘Impaticises’ an existing PowerPoint file for optimum delivery via the web or via email. The process ouputs an Impaticised presentation file and a holding page of HTML which can be uploaded along with a small Java player, to any server – with Impatica there is absolutely no need to deploy a specialist streaming media server.

Impatica On Cue takes the concept one stage further by using a series of user friendly templates to display synchronised PowerPoint slides alongside a video screen, a scrolling text window and an automatically generated hierarchical table of contents.

Again, the component files can simply be uploaded to any server for delivery without the need for streaming media software and Impatica can be configured to output different versions of the same presentation to allow for the different levels of compression required to accommodate both high and low bandwidth with one click of the mouse.

SPR CEO Mike Semple Piggot commented: "We are delighted to be able to add Impatica to our range of multimedia e-learning products. With Impatica training professionals can use a familiar interface to be as creative as they like, using graphics, animation, audio files and video files, and be sure that their online training is deliverable to the widest audience possible".

Impatica licences are available from SPR on an authorship basis for £7,500 + VAT per user. To find out more contact Mike Semple Piggot on 020 8742 1357.

Formed in 1996, Semple Piggot Rochez (legal Education) Ltd is the first legal training firm in the world to deliver full law degree programmes over the Internet. The organisation provides tuition for students reading for The University of London LLB and LLM degrees. The SPR group of companies also publish The Legal Practitioner suite of multimedia CPD training products, various online legal texts and periodicals, produce training films and corporate video for law firms and provide a full web design service.

Located in Ottawa Canada, Impatica Inc. was incorporated in March of 1998. The company has operations in Baltimore, Princeton and London, England. Growing steadily, Impatica now employs more than thirty-five people. While it is a reporting issuer in Ontario, Canada, the company has not yet established a public market for its shares. Since April 2001 almost 1,000 organizations including some 450 colleges and universities and almost 300 corporations have adopted Impatica products to communicate more effectively with hundreds of thousands of people every day.