TOKYO -- Toshiba Corporation announced today that it has agreed with Individual, Inc. of the U.S. to establish a new company providing customized Japanese-language news services to the Japanese market. A new joint-venture company, NewsWatch, will aggregate news and information from the huge volumes of data that Japanese newspapers, wire services, magazines and periodicals publish every day, and will filter and deliver customized news to corporate managers and executives via the Internet.

NewsWatch will start business operations in June this year in Tokyo. Toshiba expects to establish NewsWatch on April 26, with an initial paid-up capital of 100 million yen. Individual, a leading U.S. provider of customized news to business professionals, will become an equal partner in the company by the end of May, bringing additional capital to the joint venture. Mitsui & Co. is also expected to participate in the joint venture as a minority shareholder, and will cooperate with Individual and Toshiba in obtaining information providers and increasing the subscriber base.

NewsWatch will combine Individual's advanced technologies and business expertise for customized news filtering and retrieval with Toshiba's proprietary information filtering technology, including advanced key-word filtering logic and artificial intelligence technologies able to interpret the content-value of Japanese text. These capabilities support sophisticated text identification and selection, allowing NewsWatch to provide highly customized information services.

Toshiba is positioning itself to take full advantage of new business opportunities offered by the development of multimedia. Towards this end, it is promoting a company wide program, the Advanced I project, designed to foster new technologies and services. Advanced I is further reinforcing the company's sophisticated system technologies in the field of information processing and telecommunications, and is launching new software-oriented businesses, including the establishment of information/ telecommunications infrastructure and information filtering and contents provision. The joint venture with Individual is a direct result of Advanced I.

Outline of Individual, Inc

CEO	Yoshi Amram
Address	8 New England Executive Park West Burlington, Massachusetts 01803
Business activities	Customized news retrieval and provider service
Revenues	US $16.7 million (1995)
Employees	158 (End of '95)

Outline of NewsWatch

President	Kiyoshi Yanai, (currently Chief Specialist, Advanced-I Planning Division, Toshiba Corporation)
Head office	2-1, Ginza 5-chome, Chuo Ku, Tokyo
Paid up-Capital	100 million yen
Date Established	April 26, 1996 (planned)
Employees	20 (initial year)
Revenue(target):	200 million to 300 million yen by the year 2000