Kirusa's Open standards-based multimodal solution provides the foundation for FTW's work on next generation mobile applications that combine voice, text, graphics and touch

Vienna, Austria, and Edison, NJ – June 28, 2004 – Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien (FTW), the premier telecommunications research institute in Austria, and Kirusa, the world’s leading provider of multimodal infrastructure solutions, today announced that FTW will use Kirusa’s Multimodal Solutions in its research program on mobile multimodal user interfaces. The research program, funded by leading carriers and information technology providers in Austria, involves building and showcasing several multimodal applications for delivery on a wide range of mobile devices on 2.5G and 3G wireless networks.

FTW’s MONA project (Mobile multimOdal Next generation Applications, mona.ftw.at) is funded by Kapsch CarrierCom AG, Mobilkom Austria AG and Siemens Österreich AG together with the Austrian competence centre programme Kplus. The project is showcasing the value of multimodality in a messaging application, called MONA@Work, and in a multi user real-time game, MONA@Play. Consumers can entertain themselves on their phones with a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” style MONA@Play, while enterprise customers can manage email, voicemail, SMS, and MMS with MONA@Work.

“Kirusa’s multimodal technology is a central pillar in our vision for a new class of exciting and user-friendly applications in mobile communications. Having Kirusa as a partner enables us to focus on research issues such as device-independent multimodal authoring and conversational speech recognition that come into view once a powerful multimodal infrastructure using Kirusa’s servers is in place”, said Georg Niklfeld, project manager of the MONA project at FTW.

Enabling wireless carriers, service providers, and enterprises to offer applications with integrated voice and visual interfaces, Kirusa’s multimodal solutions allow mobile users to simultaneously or alternatively use voice, text, graphics, keypad, and stylus to interface with wireless services and applications. The solution integrates seamlessly with industry standard technologies such as SMS, WAP, XHTML, VoiceXML, and HTTP, and supports all major mobile networks, including CDMA, CDMA 1x/3x, GSM, GPRS, UMTS, Flash OFDM, WiFi, and others. Enabling compelling multimodal end-user applications on a wide variety of handsets from all major manufacturers – carriers and enterprises offering this dynamic service are able to monetize voice and data applications immediately, leveraging the new smart devices, as well as devices already widely deployed in their networks.

Kirusa’s Circuit Voice multimodal platform, IP Voice Multimodal Platform, and IP Voice Multimodal Clients have been integrated into FTW’s MONA architecture.

“FTW is at the forefront of research into multimodal interfaces for mobile users, and we are pleased to be involved in their projects”, said David Berkley, Chief Scientist of Kirusa. “The results from the MONA project will prove invaluable in delivering revenue generating mobile applications to consumers and enterprises.”

About FTW
Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien (ftw., Telecommunications Research Center Vienna) is the joint research center of the leading players in business and science responsible for developing telecommunications in Austria. It brings together departments from Vienna University of Technology, several well-known telecommunications companies, some smaller enterprises, the Austrian Research Center Seibersdorf and the Association of the Electrotechnical and Electronics Industry. The expertise accumulated at ftw. makes it the primary address for Austrian telecom companies, as well as one of the leading institutions worldwide for application-oriented research in telecommunications. For more information about ftw. please visit www.ftw.at.


About Kirusa
Kirusa, Inc. is a multimodal infrastructure company that has developed industry leading multimodal technology (with several patents pending) for the delivery of data applications using multimodal interfaces. This next generation of wireless technology allows users to customize the presentation of information on wireless devices by either alternating, or simultaneously receiving data through visual and voice interfaces. Kirusa's customers include the worlds' leading telecom carriers, such as France Telecom, Bouygues Telecom, and mobilkom austria. Kirusa is headquartered in Edison, New Jersey and was founded by telecom and Internet industry veterans from AT&T, Lucent and Vodafone Airtouch. For more information about Kirusa please call its headquarters at +1 (732) 623-2118 or visit www.kirusa.com.


Media Contact: Inderpal Singh Mumick, Kirusa, Inc, +1 732 623-2118 ext. 217, mumick@kirusa.com

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