VILNIUS, 30 January 2006 – The StartDial application designed and developed by a team of Metasite engineers has been selected for the final stage of the SIMAGINE2006, the Worldwide Mobile Communication and Java Card™ developer contest organized by Axalto, Samsung Electronics and Sun Microsystems.

The 8 finalist teams will present their projects in public on the Axalto stand in the GSM World Congress from 13 to 16 February, 2006.

The winners will be announced on 14 February, 2006 during the gala evening to be attended by the participants and VIPs from the GSM sector.

“Over 300 teams from all over the world have entered the global SIMAGINE contest this year, and being chosen to be among the 8 finalists is a tremendous achievement of our entire engineering team,” said Marius Vilimas, Head of Systems Development at Metasite Business Solutions. “We are all very excited and proud, and look forward to taking part in the final stage of the competition at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona.”

Under the tagline Create the wireless applications of the future!, the annual SIMAGINE contest invites Java™ developers, specialists in telecommunications and researchers to use creative skills to develop tomorrow’s wireless applications using (U) SIM cards based on Java Card™ technology and leveraging new technologies such as JavaCard™, SIM toolkit, J2ME with JSR 177, EAP SIM, SIM Sentry and WLAN-VPN.

The SIMAGINE2006 Selection Committee includes representatives of key players in the world of wireless communications, Java™, industry and standards organizations, and evaluate projects for their innovation, marketing appeal, feasibility and user-friendliness.

The StartDial application developed by Metasite for the contest innovatively utilizes the simple “dialing” interface to launch pre-defined mobile internet sites / VAS services, in essence creating a “speed dial” for the mobile internet and providing instant gratification to the users. By using the StartDial technology, accessibility and usability of mobile sites is radically improved, leading to increased number of satisfied users and more revenue both for operators and for the site owners.

“In 2.5G and 3G networks mobile data and value added services play an increasingly significant role. A lot of effort is therefore directed towards educating the end-user about the new and exciting services becoming available on the mobile internet. We are convinced that the best course of action for operators today is focusing on simplifying the user interface of these mobile services and making them more accessible: once it becomes easy to access any mobile service for huge numbers of mobile handset users, the supply of quality mobile sites will start growing exponentially”, noted Marius Vilimas.

“Currently very few users are savvy enough to enter a site URL via the handsets interface; even getting to the bookmarks menu is difficult for most. It is therefore almost impossible to advertise and promote stand-alone mobile sites and services if they cannot be found directly on the operator portal: even if an ad spells out the full URL of the mobile site and provides instructions on setting the site up as a bookmark, it requires too much effort for the user to actually set it up and connect to it.”

The StartDial solution removes this obstacle and makes spontaneous, “here and now” launching of mobile internet sites and services easy.

“Deployment of the StartDial technology would open exciting opportunities both for third-party VAS providers, for advertisers and for operators”, said Marius Vilimas. “Technically the solution is feasible in a 2.5G/3G environment, where more advanced mobile internet/data services exist and most of the handsets come with a mobile web/wap browser preinstalled and ready for use. We therefore look forward to working with mobile operators interested in evaluating, customizing and deploying the StartDial solution in their networks”.

For Metasite, the StartDial project is another addition to the long line of cutting-edge business and technology solutions, many of which have been successfully deployed for enterprise clients in the Baltics, Great Britain and Russian Federation.