SmartServ Signs Agreement to Provide Wireless Services to Visual Data's TheFirstNews.com

Business Wire, Nov 16, 2000

Business Editors

STAMFORD, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 16, 2000

SmartServ's Device-Universal Platform To Extend Personalized

Financial News Services And Alerts To The Wireless Realm

SmartServ Online(R), Inc. (NASDAQ: SSOL), a leading Web and wireless ASP that enables businesses to extend their services to the wireless world, today announced an agreement with TheFirstNews.com(TM) Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Visual Data Corporation (NASDAQ: VDAT) that provides personalized financial and business news in streaming audio and text format. Under the terms of the agreement, TheFirstNews.com, with its global affiliate program of more than 70 leading online brokerages, investment firms and business news providers, will now be able to deliver its news information services in text form across the range of wireless devices, including PDAs, WAP-enabled devices and RIM pagers.

"This three-year agreement between SmartServ and TheFirstNews.com is in keeping with SmartServ's belief that highly personalized content and its distribution will drive transactions," said Sam Cassetta, Chairman and CEO, SmartServ. "Using SmartServ's platform, enterprises can generate further revenue by bringing their existing applications to the full array of wireless devices. This application demonstrates that our technology is ideally suited to businesses that want to extend their complex, made-to-order news, alerts and information applications to the wireless consumer."

TheFirstNews.com provides information from a wide aggregation of top news sources, including television, news wires and the Internet. Users can customize their personalized newscasts to include particular industries, individual stocks or combinations of both. Newscasts consist of breaking news, rumors, leading analyst perspectives and other information to help subscribers make trading decisions without having to monitor a multitude of news sources individually.

This wireless solution, which will use SmartServ's W2W Middleware(SM), employs XML-based feeds from TheFirstNews.com and distributes only the information specifically requested, removing the chance that the subscriber will suffer alert fatigue.

"Until now, information from TheFirstNews.com has been delivered solely over the Internet to our customers' PCs, using streaming audio and accompanying text," said Gabe Sciolla, COO, TheFirstNews.com. "Our agreement with SmartServ opens up a whole new way for us to provide timely and valuable information to our subscribers. Now they can get their personalized news and alerts on the go, no matter where they are or what wireless device they happen to be using." Added Sciolla, "We chose SmartServ's platform because of their ability to expedite the delivery of our text-based wireless offering due out in first quarter 2001."

About TheFirstNews.com(TM)

TheFirstNews.com is a personalized news and information manager for investors, traders, analysts, money managers and brokers. Through its patent-pending technology, TheFirstNews.com delivers financial and business news in streaming audio and text throughout the trading day. TheFirstNews.com is distributed through a global affiliate program of companies, including Internet Stock News, CyBerCorp and A.B. Watley.

TheFirstNews.com (http://www.thefirstnews.com) is a subsidiary of Visual Data Corporation (NASDAQ: VDAT), a leading full-service provider of media, streaming content and production solutions for the Internet and, soon, interactive television. Visual Data's extensive video libraries (http://www.vdat.com) cover a wide range of topics, including travel, business information, medicine and healthcare. Through its subsidiary EDnet, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: EDNT), Visual Data has established extensive contacts throughout the motion picture and recording industries. Visual Data's current business relationships include PR Newswire, Akamai, Bloomberg, TravelWeb, Yahoo!, NBCi, RoadRunner, Rezsolutions, Intelihealth and New River Technologies.

About SmartServ Online(R)

SmartServ, a leading ASP, provides the proven technologies that financial institutions, network service providers and commercial enterprises need to bring the Internet to their customers, enabling them to use virtually any wired or mobile device to make informed decisions and execute transactions based on real-time information. SmartServ's hosted solutions speed time-to-market, anticipate ever-changing technologies and lower costs. SmartServ has a proven record of building industrial-strength transaction management systems, comprised of customized applications, global hosting and The SmartServ Transaction Routing EngineSM.

SmartServ is an established member of the WAP Forum and aims to remain at the forefront of new mobile technologies such as Bluetooth and Epoc. Visit the Company's Web site at www.smartserv.com for more information. Forward-Looking Statements This news release may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements in this document and those made from time-to-time by the Company are made under the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.