Formida Software's Spatial Solution Enables J-Phone's J-Navi Location-Based Mobile Internet Services to Go Live

New J-Navi service is the world's first live location-based business mapping service for mobile phones, serving more than one million user requests per day during its first week of operation.

Formida Software (ASX:FHL) today announced the successful public launch of Formida's mobile phone location-based mapping solution by J-Phone, Japan's premier cellular phone company. The successful implementation of the Formida solution has enabled J-Phone to meet the May 1st date for live deployment of its J-Navi service, the world's first personal location-based mapping service to be deployed live to cell phone subscribers. The J-Navi service empowers cell-phone users in any major Japanese city to locate businesses near their current position, retrieve details on the business location, phone number and product info, and display the information with an interactive map on their cell-phone's graphic display within a web micro-browser. J-Navi has proven very popular with Japanese wireless consumers, serving more than one million user requests per day during its first week of operation.

"Formida's powerful spatial data capabilities, together with the Oracle database, enabled APAS and Nippon Steel to specify, design and implement this leading-edge location-based mapping service in under six months from specification to acceptance test," proclaimed Mr. Takashi Kawamura of J-Phone's marketing department. "J-Phone's first-to-market success is a tribute to the exceptional technology from Formida Software and world class integration skills from APAS, Inc. and Nippon Steel. Services such as J-Navi will be fundamental to J-Phone's business success in the wireless consumer market."

APAS, Inc., Formida's premier Japanese system-integration partner and VAR, in conjunction with Nippon Steel as prime system integrator, implemented J-Phone's J-Navi solution for J-Phone in only six months. Formida's Fire(R) and FireRender(TM) servlet products were used to access, manage, interact with, and manipulate data in a massive Oracle Spatial database and distribute it live to J-Phone's millions of users. The Oracle Spatial database is loaded with over 17 million business listings and national map data.

The initial service was designed to support queries of up to 25,000 users per hour. Endurance tests demonstrated extraordinary benchmark performance involving more than 2.2 million spatial database queries within 48 hours, with average query processing time at 200 milliseconds.

"We are extremely satisfied with our decision to recommend a solution for J-Phone based on Formida and Oracle," said Mr. Yoshiaki Sakai, President of APAS, Inc. on reviewing results of the first week of commercial J-Navi operation. "No other architecture could deliver reliable commercial performance with such huge user numbers, and at the same time give us the flexibility to extend the applications to take advantage of new business opportunities so quickly and easily."

Formida Fire is Formida Software's premier enterprise application development environment for building interactive applications that utilize and distribute spatial data across the web. Formida Fire is optimized for manipulating and managing spatial data and fully integrates with Oracle's 8i database. Formida's FireRender servlet technology provides the traffic management capability for distributing this solution simultaneously to thousands of cell-phone users across the web. The APAS project team, together with Nippon Steel, created the J-Navi application using Formida Fire to search the business database at J-Phone, returning results in the form of web pages containing text and color map graphics to the cell-phones of tens-of-thousands of users per hour. The real-time content for each user's response (including maps) is generated dynamically from the database query - no pre-stored web content is used on the system.

"It is very pleasing to see the Oracle Spatial database used in a project that has resulted in the world's first ever wireless deployment of a commercial-grade business location service," stated Mr. Akio Hirai, Senior DB Products Manager of Oracle Corporation Japan. "Oracle has taken a strong position in the mobile device/wireless market, and Formida's location-based technologies are a key component for our further success."

"J-Phone's successful live deployment of its J-Navi location-based mapping service clearly demonstrates that Formida Software's technologies have established the benchmark standard for real-world users," stated Ray Schaaf, President and CEO, Formida Software. "Formida is excited to be part of this world leading project. Formida Software is strategically positioned and committed to maintaining its lead as the key LBS technology provider in this newly emerging, rapidly expanding market."


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