March 11, 2005 (CeBIT), Hannover , Germany - i3 micro technology (i3), a leading provider of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and IP-TV products and solutions, today announced a new video telephony solution developed in cooperation with i3 partners VCON and Orca Interactive. The solution combines the advanced VoIP and IP set top-box technology in i3's Mood 300 with the powerful and versatile development environment ZAPI4TV from VCON and Orca's RiGHTv ä IPTV middleware for integrated telephony and TV over IP. The cooperation is resulting in an easy-to-use, low-cost, high-performance video telephony solution that leverages the individual companies' existing technology, yet when combined, takes the development a big step further. The solution is aimed at operators and service providers looking to expand their offerings beyond basic IP telephony and IP-TV services. "Over the last few years we have seen a focus on cost savings and little development of new broadband services. This has lead to a situation where everybody is trying to attract subscribers with essentially the same offerings, with cost as the differentiator. At i3, we enable service providers to also compete with value-added managed services, while still maintaining the lowest total cost of ownership," says Jan Werne, CEO of i3 micro technology. "Our partnerships are of strategic importance for us and key for creating new broadband applications that we integrate into our CPE."
"We are proud to work with i3 and VCON to combine this new video telephony application with Orca's IPTV offering that includes broadcast TV, video-on-demand (VOD) and personal video recorder (PVR)," said Haggai Barel, CEO, Orca Interactive. "RiGHTv hosts third party applications such as video telephony for seamless integration into operator systems. It also gives operators the flexibility to customize the TV subscriber user interface (SUI), thereby improving usability and increasing loyalty." "The Mood300 integrated set-top box by i3micro and the Orca's IPTV offering reflects the adaptability of VCON's video telephony technology to multiple platform and application types," explained Danny On, VP Technology Alliances and OEM, VCON. "We are excited to have our video telephony technology integrated into a mature market STB that will bring true video telephony to the consumer market." New generation video telephony
Current video telephony solutions are not tailored to the consumer market. Either they are designed as an enterprise solution, and priced accordingly, or they lack the performance and ease of use that can attract a broad consumer market. With the help of its partners, VCON and Orca Interactive, i3 is now demonstrating an IP-TV based video telephony solution designed explicitly for the residential mass market. i3 is committed to making video telephony, and its many niche applications, a mass market application for broadband and fixed mobile converged networks. Recent market developments in France are very encouraging and many believe that providing high-quality, inexpensive video telephony ubiquitously over mobile phones, PC and TV sets will finally make real-time person-to-person video communications a market reality. "i3 focuses on cost-effective CPE solutions for triple play services, and no other application is more 'triple play' than TV-based video telephony. We are very pleased to work with VCON to integrate their high-performance video telephony application in our IP set-top boxes. We are also pleased to announce our partnership with Orca Interactive, who is the first middleware partner to integrate the video telephony application into their product," says Leif Björklund, Head of Business Development at i3. i3 provides advanced network-oriented CPE that enables service providers to more profitably leverage their multi-service IP network - enabling them to not only provide basic services for voice, TV and Internet access, but also utilize the potentials of service convergence to build new service revenue through an expanded portfolio of broadband services. | 
