Kanematsu Communications Ltd., A Leading Systems Integrator and Mobile Solutions Provider in Japan, Licenses, Sells and Markets Air2Web's Wireless Platform

Business Wire, July 24, 2001

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 24, 2001

Kanematsu Communications Takes Enterprise Businesses in Japan

Wireless Using Air2Web's Mobile Internet Platform

Air2Web Inc., the leading wireless platform provider, Tuesday announced it has further expanded its operations into the Asia-Pacific market through an agreement with Kanematsu Communications Ltd. (KCS), formally known as Kanematsu Computer Systems Ltd., a subsidiary of Kanematsu Corp., one of the top systems integrators and mobile solutions providers in Japan.

Under the terms of the agreement, KCS has completely duplicated the platform and hardware infrastructure of Air2Web's U.S. operation and are providing the same state-of-the-art application hosting with day to day applications management and round-the-clock support.

In addition to establishing a direct sales initiative to market and sell the Air2Web platform, KCS will be forming a channel partner program and training program to further market the Air2Web solution.

The Air2Web platform will be housed in Japan. This new agreement further expands Air2Web's relationship with KCS, who for the past year, has been providing localized sales, engineering services, and technical support for Air2Web in Japan.

KCS is one of the largest phone distributors in Japan, selling more than 1 million mobile phones per year across Japan, and is one of the leading distributors for NTT DoCoMo, whose I-mode service, one of Japan's three primary wireless internet networks, has grown rapidly to more than 25 million subscribers.

Air2Web's Mobile Internet Platform(TM) solution enables businesses to create, deploy and deliver enterprise applications to their customers and employees using any digital wireless device.

This includes I-Mode, EZweb and J-Sky devices and other Internet-enabled phones, Short Message Service (SMS) phones, pagers and pervasive computing devices.

By leveraging Air2Web's wireless platform technology, as well as the accumulated technologies and resources of KCS, KCS will extend its superior content and application services to large enterprises, as well as wireless phone users.

"KCS is one of Japan's most capable and recognized leaders in the mobile marketplace," said Sanjoy Malik, president and chief executive officer of Air2Web.

"I can't think of a better partner to lead Japan's business sector into the wireless arena and assist them in reaping the returns of wirelessly enabling their enterprises, as their American counterparts have done."

"Using our wireless technologies and application development expertise, KCS has established itself as a leading provider of wireless content in Japan," said Mac Yoneda, corporate director & general manager of KCS's Wireless Service Division.

"Using Air2Web's wireless platform as a foundation for enabling anytime, anywhere access to enterprise data, will allow us to also become a leader in wirelessly enabling access to critical back-end data by a business' customers and employees."

Air2Web technology is compatible with the three primary networks and standards in Japan as well as with their associated international markup types including NTT DoCoMo I-mode which uses Compact Hypertext Markup Language (cHTML), J-Phone's J-Sky which uses Mobile Markup Language (MML), and KDDI's EZweb which uses Handheld Device Markup Language (HDML).

Built to open standards for both web and wireless carriers, Air2Web technology incorporates industry-accepted security standards, thereby ensuring platform independence, location independence, and ease of integration with other applications and solutions.

Air2Web combines a robust XML-based API with tools, information, and an online wireless development community to help KCS define, create, test, and deploy their interactive enterprise mobile applications.

In addition to supporting the Japanese digital standards, the Air2Web platform provides international support for 2-way Short Message Service (SMS) in Europe and the United States, which allows application deployment that takes advantage of user-initiated two-way text conversations.

It also supports streaming audio, text-to-speech, and voice recognition. Air2Web also supports any data format, including XML, HTML, flat files, and a variety of audio formats, thereby easing information exchange.

Air2Web's Mobile Internet Platform also provides Wireless Provisioning and Anonymous Browsing components. The Wireless Provisioning feature enables end-users to provision their wireless device online from an Internet-enabled device (a WAP phone or pervasive computing device such as a PALM).

In places like Japan where PCs aren't as prevalent, this component enables a user to provision their Internet-enabled phone or PDA right from the wireless device itself.

The Anonymous Browsing feature allows end-users to browse an application (which is less proprietary), via their Internet-enabled phone or PDA, without provisioning their wireless device.

For example, an organization might want their employees to wirelessly view the latest company news. The employee simply enters the URL for the "news application" into their wireless device, and they have instant access.