CellPoint (NASD: CLPT) (www.cellpt.com) announces Finder!(TM), an innovative application enabling the new mobile Internet generation to locate friends easily and communicate in a brand new way. Finder! is not only useful but also provides a level of entertainment - an increasingly important ingredient for successful new mobile applications. "The fun factor is what cellular operators are experiencing as an emerging killer application area," said Peter Henricsson, Chairman of CellPoint Inc.
Finder! gives you a Friends List - just choose a friend and you will soon know their location. "The Finder! service provides both value and entertainment," said Hadar Cars, President of CellPoint's European operating subsidiary CellPoint Systems. "The youth and young adult market, aged 10-25 years, coupled with pre-paid, are explosive growth segments of the cellular industry. With Finder!, we are tapping into the fastest growing demand area - the mobile Internet, which is projected to have 400 million users by 2004. When everything becomes wireless, you want to know where it is, and this application is loads of fun."
The user starts by defining a list of friends (the "Friends List") that they want to be able to locate, be seen by, or communicate with. When a user wants to know the location of a friend, colleague, or family member, the user selects the name on the mobile phone menu or computer. CellPoint's Finder! application then locates the user and the friend, and calculates the distance and direction to the friend. The result is communicated back to the user as a text message, such as "John is close to Piccadilly Circus, about 3.2 km west of you". Users can even request locations of several friends at a time, and can edit their Friends List either on their phone or over the Internet, downloading changes 'over the air' to their own phones.
Finder! offers multiple interfaces to the end-user, while providing a uniform look and feel for the service that is easy to use. The user is always in full control of their privacy. Finder! supports standard GSM phones and WAP phones, and can also be accessed via the Internet, providing for mass-market services today and in the future. In the near future, Finder will incorporate new exciting features, such as location information services, WAP maps to the phone, and links to advertising.
CellPoint will be launching Finder! and demonstrating its other commercially available location services at the 2000 GSM World Conference in Cannes, France this week.
CellPoint Inc. is a US company whose European subsidiary, CellPoint Systems AB, delivers services in cooperation with cellular operators worldwide. Several commercially available services are based on the CellPoint System technology that uses GSM cellular networks to determine physical locations of cellular phones and Internet applications to present results and manage services. The CellPoint System currently has the world's only end-to-end commercial service offering for digital cellular location technology; it is fully scalable, works with standard GSM phones and WAP phones in unmodified digital networks requiring no costly overlays, and can be coordinated worldwide from a remote central location.
According to The Wall Street Journal, GSM is the world's leading standard in cellular phone technology with more than 50 percent of the world cellular market. GSM accounts for more than 66% of the world digital cellular market with more than 250 million subscribers worldwide. Estimates for cellular phone usage are now at 1.5 billion users by 2005, with GSM accounting for two-thirds of the total market, and 400 million mobile Internet users by 2004.
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