VIMA Technologies Appoints David Telleen-Lawton as President and CEO

"My primary responsibility is to grow VIMA's revenues and customer base and focus product development and new technology development to maintain our performance leadership."

Santa Barbara, CA - August 21st, 2003 - VIMA Technologies' Board of Directors has elected David Telleen-Lawton as CEO and President effective immediately. "We have some interesting technology for image processing and we are experiencing growing demand.  We believe David's experience with start-up companies and his ability to uncover and develop business opportunities provide a strong match for the opportunities VIMA faces", said Tim Cheng, Chairman and co-founder.

Telleen-Lawton responded, "I'm delighted to be part of the VIMA team. We have a top-notch group of developers who are successfully converting our founders' research and discoveries into robust, revenue-producing products."  VIMA Technologies' patent-pending Perception-Based Information Retrieval (PBIR) technology is the core of several image search, image matching, and image filtering software modules that hardware and software companies purchase to improve the image processing capabilities they deliver to their own customers.

"With the growth of the Internet and World Wide Web, demand for automatically recognizing electronic images has grown steadily", Telleen-Lawton explained.  "One common example is blocking pornography by filtering email messages and web pages.  We strengthen blocking beyond the more common rules-based or text analysis filters by directly perceiving that the images are pornographic.  Another example is locating illegal, on-line sales of celebrity posters or on-line movies created in violation of copyrights. With the wider availability of high speed connections, these problems are growing substantially.  My primary responsibility is to grow VIMA's revenues and customer base and focus product development and new technology development to maintain our performance leadership.  With increased revenues, we will focus development on Ed's and Tim's backlog of keen insights on how humans perceive information of all kinds-- not just images -- and how to get computers to do it just as well."

Telleen-Lawton has lived and worked in Santa Barbara since 1980. He was an early employee of locally-founded ACC, once known as Advanced Computer Communications, and served in multiple management roles in government contract support, sales, and marketing. In 1987, he joined Montecito-based Frank H. Robinson & Company as a consultant working with start-up and Fortune 500 clients.

"The nearly seven years I spent working with Frank, creating and using the Market Validation process, changed my life and my career. I learned how to understand a business opportunity and how to develop customers in parallel with developing products. We saved our clients years of engineering time and millions of dollars by keeping them focused on this fast, rigorous path to revenue. I'm bringing that hard-earned discipline and experience to VIMA."

Telleen-Lawton left consulting in 1993 to become VP of Marketing at start-up SpectraLink Corporation (NSDQ: SLNK), helping lead them to a successful IPO with strong growth and profitability to this day. He later became VP of Sales for SupplyEdge, Inc. in Pasadena. Returning to Santa Barbara in 2001, Telleen-Lawton created his own consulting business, Decisive Path. VIMA Technologies was one of his clients.

Telleen-Lawton earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University and also earned the designation of Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) from the Association of Investment Management and Research. He is a charter member of the Southern California Keiretsu Forum, an angel investment group, and has been active on the Southern California Software Council Planning Committee as well as the Episcopal Church and the Foundation for Self-Sufficiency in Central America. With his wife Karen, they have two children - Emily, 21, a senior majoring in both Psychology and Economics at Scripps College in Pomona and Timothy, 20, who is beginning his junior year majoring in Earth Systems at Stanford University.

About VIMA Technologies: Founded in January 2001 by Edward Chang and Tim Cheng, Professors of Computer Engineering at UCSB, VIMA Technologies is a leader of image filtering and image analysis software. Besides their recently introduced consumer product, ImageBeagle for scanning and removing pornography from home computers, VIMA supplies system developers with a wide range of integrated multimedia filtering, retrieval, and organization tools. VIMA is a privately-held, venture-backed company.

VIMA Technologies, Inc. is moving to 120 Cremona Drive in Goleta's University Business Center and can be reached at (805) 685-7840 after September 1st.

Market Validation is a trademark of Frank H. Robinson & Co., Inc.

For Media Inquiries, contact:

David Telleen-Lawton
Phone: (805)685-7067
Fax: (805)685-2178
DTL@VIMAtech.com,