Tim Illingworth joins Icona as Commercial Director

Icona Solutions Ltd announced today that Tim Illingworth has joined the company as Commercial Director. His initial focus will be to broaden the use of aesthetica™ within the automotive industry, the present customer base includes GM, Nissan, Porsche and Bentley, and to penetrate other manufacturing sectors.

With significant experience in the PLM and Computer Aided Design and Engineering sectors, Tim brings to Icona an international perspective and track record of successfully developing and growing innovative software companies, implementing multi-channel Sales and Marketing solutions. He has previously held senior executive positions within EADS, Matra Datavision, MDTVision and IBM in the UK, Europe and North America.

Tim decided to join Icona Solutions Ltd because of the unique opportunity to build on the initial success achieved to date with their aesthetica™ software in the automotive market with a number of major OEMs.

“Icona clearly have what their customers need and the deployment of aesthetica™ software is already making major improvements on their customers design and engineering processes. aesthetica™ has shown that it is possible to give a fast return on Investment, making significant time and cost savings by giving access to a full product quality review, both Exterior and Interior, at an early stage in the vehicle development process for both Designers and Engineers” says Tim.

Icona's aesthetica™ software uniquely enables companies to visualise the aesthetic impact of manufacturing variation in a digital model at an earlier stage in their product development cycle. aesthetica™ V3 will be released in April 2008 and a number of other exciting solutions are in the pipeline.

“Tim's experience in creating and developing successful international software companies will prove invaluable in the next phase of the corporate development at Icona Solutions. We are looking forward to working with Tim to build on the success achieved to date," states David Belford, Executive Chairman

Manchester, UK, February 14th, 2008

NOTES

About aesthetica.
Icona Solutions' aesthetica™ software is widely used in the automotive industry for providing an accurate, visual simulation of the effects of component variation, assembly variation and component deformation in manufactured assemblies in order to resolve issues of fit and finish quality. It presents results using a high quality interactive 3D virtual reproduction of a product so that the engineer or designer can visualize it at different states within its geometric tolerance range, in real-time and precisely as the customer will see the final product.

The use of aesthetica gives greater insight than has previously been possible into the impact of manufacturing variation, thereby improving perceived quality while saving time and improving communication in the design process. For more information, please visit: www.iconasolutions.com.

About Icona Solutions Limited.
Founded in 2003, Icona Solutions Ltd. developed out of pioneering work undertaken at the School of Computing, University of Leeds in the UK. The company developed the aesthetica software product for simulating and visualizing the effects of manufacturing tolerances on manufactured products, which it markets to the worldwide automotive industry both directly and through qualified distributors. The principal institutional shareholder is IP Group plc. Other shareholders include North West Equity Fund, North West Business Scheme, White Rose Technology and Management.