Bowling Green, Ohio, May 22, 2000, Senecio Software, Inc. announced today that it has received a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant for $100,000 from the National Institutes of Health to create an alpha version of a web-based, all Java® survey software, AskAnywhere®.

Phase I of the AskAnywhere® project will concentrate on the design of a powerful but easy-to-use set of Java®-based programs for writing and administering large-scale, complex surveys over Internet. Scheduled for development in the AskAnywhere® package are 1) a desktop questionnaire editing application, 2) a client-side data collection Java® applet, and 3) middleware decryption and analysis servlets.

The questionnaire editing application feature will ease the task of writing, designing, "programming," and editing the behavior of complex surveys. The client-side data collection applet reproduces each page created by the WYSIWYG editing application and also parses interprets, and performs all calculations and skip instructions "programmed" using into the survey.

According to Jerry Wicks, President of Senecio Software, Inc., "when fully developed, AskAnywhere® will offer scientists and market researchers a far more robust and secure product with a much wider range of options than a standard or a hybrid HTML survey package could."

"This is just the first step in our development of the AskAnywhere® survey system," said Wicks. "Once we have the Questionnaire editor and middleware components in place this model will allow us to not only extend and deploy these data collection solutions in telephone centers, in-store kiosks, and mobile phones as well as just about any data collection situation you can think of."

About Senecio Software

Founded in 1992, Senecio Software, Inc. is an Ohio-based corporation specializing in the design and production of software for the collection and analysis of social and market research data. Given the rapid rise in the use of the Internet for commerce and its growing use among all segments of society, Senecio's corporate strategy has been expanded to supply professional survey research tools and services to scientists and market researchers demanding more advanced software tools for their Internet survey work as well as the development of advanced data gathering tools involving remote sensing and wireless communication. Senecio Software, Inc. can be reached by telephone (419-352-4371), fax (419-354-7512), e-mail (info@senecio.com) or the world wide web (www.senecio.com).

Java is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems. AskAnywhere is a registered trademark of Senecio Software, Inc.