Open-Plug and tmi enter into a marketing partnership

Sophia Antipolis, France, / Palo Alto, California USA, 10 November 2004 - Open-Plug, a leading provider of new generation software frameworks for mass-market mobile phones and thin multimedia inc. (tmi), a leading provider of mobile video and audio technologies, have announced a marketing partnership to deliver tmi’s 3GPP video and audio codecs for GSM and UMTS handsets with ELIPS from Open-Plug, to allow mobile phone makers to quickly build new handsets with full multimedia capabilities.

“As the wireless terminal market becomes more complex, with a growing number of applications and services being integrated in wireless devices, seamless and quick implementation of multimedia features has become crucial for handset makers and operators to maintain or even increase ARPU” commented Eric Baissus, CEO, Open-Plug. “The partnership of tmi and Open Plug delivers a concrete answer to cope with this challenge. Rapid and high quality, cost optimised, integration of multimedia applications that is hardware independent is what we deliver to our customers,” he continued.

Open-Plug has developed ELIPS, a new generation of software framework, the first component-based software framework targeting mass-market mobile phones. ELIPS sits above the RTOS of a mobile handset and thus offers a hardware independent integration. Having a small footprint and embedded engine on the mobile phone, the ELIPS Run Time System delivers the flexibility of component-based technology with no resource and power consumption penalty, which is of major importance to the mobile market place.

tmi provide purely software based video decoder and encoder clients for 3GPP codecs, MPEG-4, H.263 and H.264. In addition to these, tmi supplies a wide variety of standard audio codecs such as MP3, AAC(plus), HE-AACplus V2.0, QCELP and AMR. tmi’s codec solutions, which can be modularly implemented under the ELIPS framework, enable a handset reference design to be turned into a real multimedia enabled mobile phone in significantly shorter development times.

“tmi’s codecs have been well proven in millions of mobiles currently in use,” said David D. Kim, SVP of tmi. “Combining tmi’s codecs with the ELIPS framework allows handset manufacturers to experience a double benefit, high quality video codecs can be implemented in no time, further reducing time-to-market.”

About thin multimedia, inc.

thin multimedia, inc. (tmi) provides complete mobile video solutions, which include authoring tools, streaming server software and a software-based player for mobile handsets. At the core of the solution is a full range of compression/decompression software with both standards based and patent-protected technologies that enable excellent playback quality on today's mobile handsets and networks. The company's software solutions have been commercially available since July 2001, offering streaming video, video MMS, animation, movie, music video news and sports clips, and traffic surveillance to mobile users. tmi's solutions provide carrier-grade quality for large-scale deployments all around the world. There are over 17 million mobile devices embedded with tmi's client software among seven world class carriers on three continents. www.thinmultimedia.com.

About OpenPlug: Open-Plug was founded in the summer of 2002 by a team of developers with a strong background in embedded mobile software development, and familiar with the quickly expanding challenges associated with it. The company’s aim is to provide to the mobile phone industry a tool framework, providing a unique Software design flow, which supports seamlessly and efficiently the value chain of embedded software development for Mobile terminals.

Reader enquiries:

Open-Plug SAS, 2455 Route des Dolines, 06560 Sophia Antipolis, France

Tel: +33 4 92 94 21 21,

Fax: +33 4 92 94 20 20

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www.open-plug.com