Maporama markets first i-mode location-centric applications outside Japan - New Products & Services - Brief Article

Mobile Internet, The, May, 2002

Maporama, a provider of online location-centric applications, announced the launch of its i-mode platform, the first market-ready professional location-centric product offered by a non-Japanese provider. Thanks to this new platform compatibility, any Maporama customer can now easily integrate full-blown i-mode based location-centric solutions into their Internet services.

Maporama's i-mode platform offers many features, bringing a quality user experience to mobile location-centric applications. Color maps, full-blown itineraries, user accounts, stored preferences, and multi-lingual capabilities make Maporama's i-mode products the most advanced mobile location-centric solutions on the market.

Maps obtained via an i-mode-enabled device are displayed in color, thereby offering much better legibility than classical WAP phones. Routing functionalities of Maporama's i-mode platform support the display of color maps of the entire trajectory, detailed turn-by-turn directions, and detailed street-level maps of the destination as well as of the departure addresses.

Maporama's i-mode platform exploits the same technology as all Maporama's products, more precisely XML/XSL and ASP. Thanks to the extreme flexibility of Maporama's architecture, Maporama's i-mode platform is compatible with virtually any i-mode device on the market.

Companies that provide services to their clients enhanced with Maporama's i-mode platform can also offer unique features, such as personal accounts with their custom preferences and settings that can even be shared between the Web and i-mode. Using this functionality, users can save their favorite maps on Maporama's servers and then access them interchangeably from the Web and their favorite i-mode device. Maporama has already contracted new clients that will utilize Maporama's i-mode platform. Names are to be announced in the near future.