PRESS RELEASES 
SIMtone Corporation Announces Cloud Computing Pilot with Minnesota Online High School
Durham, NC (May 13, 2009) – SIMtone Corporation, a privately held company delivering Universal Computing, today announced that it is delivering low-cost, virtual desktops to students and faculty at a high school in Minnesota. The pilot is part of the SIMtone Education Thunder Program which aims to help close the digital divide and provide access to full PCs in the cloud to the estimated five billion people who cannot afford it, without requiring them to own a computer.
Minnesota Online High School (MNOHS) is a public, state-funded school, and is open to any Minnesota resident, age 20 or younger. The school offers a comprehensive high school curriculum and college prep courses to students in grades 10-12. At MNOHS, students and teachers connect with one another online and on their own schedule. The school’s comprehensive curriculum provides students the flexibility of attending to their work and family obligations while pursuing a rigorous college preparatory program. Using state-of-the-art software and communication tools, students investigate, read, write and debate their ideas across the curriculum to prepare themselves for college and work in a connected world.
“Prior to this exciting pilot with SIMtone, it was a very cumbersome process to deliver applications and coursework to our home-based students,” said Ned Zimmerman-Bence, Executive Director of the Minnesota Online High School. “To equip our students and faculty with the required educational software, we had to ship every piece of software to each person. In addition, we found it difficult to support a variety of platforms including XP, Vista and Mac with our small technology staff. With the SIMtone Virtual PC service, we can provide our students and faculty with virtualized desktops from any computer at home or public library. Each virtual desktop is pre-loaded with course-crucial software including Microsoft Office, Geometer’s Sketchpad, Fathom and Adobe Premiere and Elements.”
The SIMtone Education Thunder Program aims to provide students with their own, school-managed, SIMtone-powered PC in the cloud, containing their own coursework, homework, school services, personal files and other education materials.
“We are pleased to expand the SIMtone Education Thunder program by working with the Minnesota Online High School which heavily relies on technology to interact with its home-based students,” stated Chris Mellon, VP for Sales at SIMtone Corporation. “We look forward to helping the school deliver educational applications via the cloud directly to students utilizing our virtual PC service.”
SIMtone’s Universal Cloud Computing Platform simplifies the delivery of virtual desktops and other cloud services to users across an array of endpoint devices. Among the schools utilizing SIMtone, it allows students to have a fully-functional computer environment without requiring them to own a PC. With SIMtone, educational institutions at all levels can avoid the up-front expenditures needed to purchase computers, as well as the infrastructure required to support them. Since SIMtone enables simple, on-demand access to PCs hosted in the cloud, students of all education levels can use it from anywhere there is a broadband connection – at home, the library, and classroom.
As part of the SIMtone Education Thunder program, the company is working with several schools across the country to deliver virtual PC environments. The Frank Porter Graham Elementary School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina is one of the most recent projects where SIMtone provided approximately 600 students and faculty with “PCs in the Cloud.”
About Minnesota Online High School
Minnesota Online High School (MNOHS) is a public charter school, funded by the state of Minnesota and open to all state residents under the age of 21. The school offers a comprehensive high school curriculum and college prep courses to students in grades 10-12. Using state-of-the-art software and communication tools, students investigate, read, write and debate their ideas across the curriculum to prepare students for college and work in our connected world.
About SIMtone Corporation
The SIMtone Corporation makes Cloud Computing universally simple. The company has developed and commercialized the patented SIMtone Universal Cloud Computing Platform that allows network operators and businesses to host, manage and quickly provision any Cloud-hosted services, and ubiquitously deliver them to zero-touch terminals that can be standalone, low cost hardware appliances, or software terminals usable via browsers or on PCs, thin clients and mobile devices. With the SIMtone, Cloud services such as virtual desktops, DaaS/SaaS, PC Remote Access or Web services, are simple and very inexpensive to host and manage for businesses and providers, and become usable without a computer, on-demand and on-the-fly, simply and safely, by everyone, everywhere. SIMtone Corporation’s North American headquarters are based in Durham, North Carolina and SIMtone International headquarters are based in Vevey, Switzerland. SIMtone is a privately-held company backed by Motorola Ventures, Brightstar Corporation and Kodiak Venture Partners. For more information: www.SIMtone.net.