Echo360 and Blackboard Inc. Partnership Gives Faculty Universal Access to Lecture Capture

DULLES, VA--(Marketwire - October 28, 2008) - Echo360™ today announced a partnership with Blackboard Inc. that gives instructors at more than 2,000 Blackboard® institutions access to a free personal version of the Echo360 capture software. The companies inked a three-year deal that calls for Echo360 software to be distributed with Blackboard solutions to its higher education client community in the U.S. and Canada beginning in spring of 2009.

Echo360 is leading education's Rewind Revolution to free the lecture from the lecture hall, enabling students to achieve higher levels of engagement and retention by reliving the classroom experience online. With a significant proportion of postsecondary faculty utilizing Blackboard technology, lecture capture becomes a faculty-driven revolution in higher education.

"Echo360's capture technology represents a significant added value for our client community and can help institutions advance their mission to more effectively engage students in learning experiences anytime, anywhere," commented Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen. "This partnership makes sense given our shared dedication to creating innovative solutions that enhance the teaching and learning process."

The partnership places faculty on the front line of the campus-wide lecture capture phenomenon by transforming every teaching venue, office or even the instructor's home into an academic studio. Instructors can capture, edit and publish rich media content to their Blackboard courses with a click of the mouse.

"We're witnessing the democratization of lecture capture," said Fred Singer, CEO of Echo360. "The Blackboard and Echo360 partnership empowers the professor to extend classroom learning, either by capturing and distributing lectures or by creating special learning modules to help students improve their mastery of the material."

The EchoSystem will continue to serve as the nerve center for lecture capture operations for existing Echo360 clients. The personal capture software integrates with the EchoSystem platform, giving campus IT staff an easy upgrade path to venue-based capture. Content created as part of the Blackboard partnership is fully compatible with existing implementations.

The partnership comes on the heels of a $15 million Series B funding round for Echo360, led by Court Square Ventures with current investors SCP Partners and SoftBank Capital participating. It is the next step in the long standing relationship between Echo360 and the industry's top course management company. Echo360 set the stage for lecture capture to drive CMS utilization in 2005 with the first integration to automatically publish on-demand lectures to the Blackboard platform. Echo360 has captured and hosted presentations from Blackboard's BbWorld® events for three years.

The announcement coincides with the launch of the Blackboard Alliance Program™ at the EDUCAUSE 2008 annual conference, in which Echo360 is a charter Blackboard Premier Partner™.

About Echo360

Echo360 envisions an opportunity for every student to be freed from traditional barriers to learning with an on-demand education experience. Full-time, part-time, distance, continuing, and online all describe today's student living in a 24/7 world. On-demand media and education converge at the newly-formed Echo360, helping colleges and universities engage students on the students' terms with full and unbounded access to classroom-based content via multiplatform replay. Developed in partnership with the University of Western Australia, Echo360 means scalable and affordable lecture capture solutions that can provide institutions of all sizes with universal availability of lecture content.

Contact Information: Contact: Mary Young Director, Marketing Echo360 (703) 963-2467