UTFC Invests $250K in Text Communications Provider NXi Communications

From: Business Wire (press release) - San Francisco,CA,USA - Jan 24, 2005

UTFC Invests $250K in Text Communications Provider NXi Communications; Firm Offers TTY-Enabled Networks, Branching into Emergency Notification

SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 24, 2005--UTFC Financing Solutions, LLC today announced a $250,000 investment in NXi Communications, which specializes in the development of advanced computer technology products for text communications.

The Salt Lake City-based firm (www.nextalk.com) makes large enterprises accessible to members of the deaf community who communicate with TTY devices, which send and receive text over phone lines. The company is now also using its technological expertise to enter the market for emergency notification services.

"They have unique patents in the industry that allow TTY calls to be distributed across a network, vastly simplifying the process," said Damon Kirchmeier, COO of UTFC. "They are the industry experts in telecommunications with the deaf -- you almost cannot search on the topic without coming across a reference to NXi or its management."

NXi spares large customers the need to deploy many TTY devices throughout their operations.

"If you want to make yourself accessible to the deaf, you don't want specialized hardware everywhere," said Thomas McLaughlin, NXi's president. "We allow you to accept those calls centrally and put them through to every desktop in your organization. For example, every employee in the federal Department of Education has a license for our product."

Other clients include call centers for Verizon, Fidelity and Microsoft, city and county governments, large organizations and statewide systems in Illinois, Wisconsin and Maine.

This is the latest in a series of investments by UTFC in the company.

"UTFC has been a good resource for us, helping us expand in the past, and now this loan will help us get emergency notification services on the market," McLaughlin said.

When organizations face fires or even homeland security-oriented threats, they need a mechanism to notify all employees, both deaf and hearing.

"We can facilitate messages sent to PCs, e-mail to wireless devices, phone calls to a voice telephone or TTY, send text to large message boards, activate warning lights and more," McLaughlin said. "Adapting what we do to a market beyond the deaf community makes sense with our architecture. We can use our advanced telephony technology, which can handle 96 calls on a single card with four T1 lines, and scale to any number of ports."

UTFC's Kirchmeier also sees the expansion as natural, saying, "Tom continually creates new products and improvements in NXi's offerings, keeping them ahead of the competition."

UTFC Financing Solutions, LLC is a small business investment company (SBIC) in Salt Lake City, that fills a unique niche in the market, providing the needed capital to start and grow businesses. It specializes in funding new businesses with little operating history and provides up to $500,000 in subordinated debt to startup companies in and around Utah. Read more at www.utfc.biz.

For more information, contact Kirchmeier at 801-741-4200 or dkirchmeier@utfc.biz; and McLaughlin at 801-274-6001 or tom@nxicom.com.

Contacts
UTFC Financing Solutions, LLC
Damon Kirchmeier, 801-741-4200
dkirchmeier@utfc.biz
or
NXi Communications
Thomas McLaughlin, 801-274-6001
tom@nxicom.com

© Business Wire 2005