Safari Books Online teams up with Liqwid Krystal

Company release, May 4, 2005

Bangalore

Liqwid Krystal, an IT company with products and solutions across the Human Capital Cycle and Safari® Books Online, a US-based joint venture between O’Reilly Media, Inc. and The Pearson Technology Group, a unit of Pearson Education, announced the signing of a distribution alliance between the two companies. As a result of this alliance, Safari will make available Safari Tech Books Online, its e-reference library of technical and business titles for users of Liqwid Krystal’s learning solutions in the Asian markets. Liqwid Krystal’s CodeSaw platform allows learners to go beyond the referencing environment of an online library by allowing users to collaborate with peers, run code samples, consult and brain storm across the learning ecosystem.

Safari Tech Books Online offers users the ability to search across more than 3500 IT and Programming titles to drill down to the exact chapter or section needed. Safari subscribers can read entire books from cover-to-cover online, or simply flip to the section they need to answer the question at hand. Safari’s deep pool of content comes from its venture partners, O'Reilly and Pearson, whose imprints include well-known names - Addison-Wesley, Alpha, Cisco Press, Adobe Press, New Riders, Peachpit Press, Prentice Hall PTR, Que and Sams as well as other well-known publishers such as Microsoft Press and IBM Redbooks.

Says Sean Devine, Managing Director, Safari Books Online, “We recognize that India and other markets in South East Asia have a large number of IT professionals who will most benefit from having instant access to thousands of IT and programming books right from their desktops through Safari.”

The imperative today is to bring technologies and marketing processes closer to learners across the academia and corporate markets. Web-based accessibility to learning helps enhance the scalability of people competencies critical to business success.

Says Anand Adkoli, Co-founder and CEO, Liqwid Krystal, “We envisage a real opportunity and imperative in the area of collaborative learning. By integrating the power of our patent pending innovation, CodeSaw with Safari Tech Books Online we help enthuse real-time, integrated referencing and learning on a scale that has perhaps never been experienced before. This means that users can run code samples from books in the browser while collaborating with peers and mentors.

Says Sean Devine, “Safari takes the best IT books from the best authors and publishers, and aggregates them into an online searchable, secure database. IT professionals are able to efficiently pinpoint reliable code examples and technical information.”

Says Anand Adkoli, “Continuous learning, peer collaboration and mentoring, skills update and certification processes are very important is today’s global sourcing era. Our partnership with Safari Books Online has a compelling value – it enables us to offer Safari’s content collection at a price point affordable to the Asian markets”.

About Safari Books Online, LLC.

Safari Books Online is a joint venture between the industry’s leading technical publishers, O’Reilly Media, Inc., and The Pearson Technology Group. Safari’s flagship service, Safari® Tech Books Online, is the premier e-reference library for programming and IT departments. Unlike an online bookstore, Safari is a fully searchable database of the electronic versions of books from O'Reilly and Pearson’s many imprints: Addison-Wesley Professional, Adobe Press, Cisco Press, Macromedia Press, New Riders, Peachpit Press, Prentice Hall PTR, Sun Microsystems Press, Que and Sams. A growing number of titles from other publishers such as Microsoft Press and Thomson South-Western are also available. Safari’s portfolio of electronic reference libraries includes four additional electronic reference libraries: Safari Bookshelf for the individual technologist, Safari HelpDesk Online for enterprise knowledge workers, Safari Business Books Online for business professionals and Safari Enterprise Library. Leveraging its powerful repository of thousands of leading technical, business and text books, Safari recently launched two new products: SafariX Text Books Online which allows students to subscribe to web versions of their text books at a significant savings versus the print edition and SafariU an education portal for creating custom print textbooks and online learning resources.

For more information call Safari Books Online at (800) 775-7331 or visit the company’s Web site at www.safaribooksonline.com.

About Liqwid Krystal

Founded in 1999, Liqwid Krystal develops next-generation technologies that leverage the Internet and corporate intranets in an endeavor to catalyze human capital within companies and learning institutions. With over 250 man-years invested in R & D over the last five years, Liqwid Krystal provides customers with experiential learning solutions across the ICT spectrum. Its CodeSawTM architecture provides learners, be it students or corporate learners with the ability to experience the transition from simple reading to hands on learning. Other products and solutions include gyanX, the company’s solution for the academic markets and resumeX, the company’s solution for the corporate markets.

For further information contact:

Proactive Public Relations

201, 2nd Floor, 'C' Block, Maria Nivas

1/4, Bore Bank Road, Benson Town,

Bangalore - 560 046

Tel: 080 23338982/ 84