NEWS RELEASE
SONIYA TECHNOLOGIES AND ROSUM CORPORATION ANNOUNCE PARTNERSHIP TO ENABLE SEAMLESS INDOOR/OUTDOOR LOCATION SERVICES
Rosum TV-GPS technology takes LBS indoors
New Orleans, 14 March 2005 - Soniya Technologies and Rosum Corporation today announced a partnership to enable seamless indoor/outdoor location services by combining Rosum’s TV-GPS technology with Soniya Technologies’ FamilyLink™.
FamilyLink™ is a location-aware service for family members to quickly and unobtrusively know where loved ones are, be it during day-to-day activities or in case of emergency. The FamilyLink™ service provides the information to a cellphone – which has become a universal, indispensable personal communications device.
Rosum Corporation is the first and only company to harness the commercial TV infrastructure for use in positioning mobile devices. This technology is uniquely suited for positioning devices indoors and in urban areas, precisely where traditional solutions such as GPS fall short. Further, Rosum integrates TV-based positioning with GPS to provide reliable and accurate position fixes across all environments, from difficult indoor urban to rural open-sky. The Rosum Location Module is being integrated into location devices for asset recovery, asset tracking and people-tracking applications. Rosum‘s development utilizes Soniya’s open interface and will provide Soniya customers access to its highly robust indoor/outdoor location technology.
Cellphones are often used in times of emergency to locate loved ones, young and old, or even reassure them that they are safe. As a result of the FCC’s E-911 mandate, cellphones are becoming location-aware, and parents can now locate their children with the push of a button using Soniya’s FamilyLink™. Devices, including cellphones, which utilize Rosum’s technology will be able to report their location even when they are within buildings and in dense urban areas – a definite advantage over GPS and assisted GPS-based solutions.
The FamilyLink™ service will display the location of loved ones on a map. Additional FamilyLink™ features include: alerts to inform the user whether a loved one has arrived at or left a location safely; the location of a missing pet; whether the teenager was speeding in a car and so on.
In summary, FamilyLink™ provides “peace of mind” for the busy and very mobile family.
Soniya Technologies developed FamilyLink™ as an illustration of the power and flexibility of Soniya Technologies’ Universal Device Service Platform (uDSP).
uDSP is developed as a service platform for wireless operators to quickly add wireless sensor-based devices to their wireless service. The platform is designed to support as many types of devices as available in the market and enables to operator to easily focus on the device needs of targeted market segments instead of spending time developing the platform. This service is then accessible by the user through a single user interface on their cellphone or via the Internet.
“Soniya provides the wireless operators a single platform from which to support and deploy new sensor-based and near real-time data streams from a variety of devices and technologies, such as Rosum TV-GPS, without having to build a separate service for each. Wireless operators are unlikely to want to support different services for a GPS-enabled phone, another service using TV signals for vehicle location, and yet another one for a pet tracker, even if there is a big enough market for each of them” added Eng Tan, VP Marketing, Soniya Technologies.
About Using Television Signals for Positioning
Rosum TV-GPS is a robust location technology based on analog and digital commercial broadcast television signals. TV towers are deployed globally around centers of population and commerce, they often broadcast multiple channels per tower at high power (typically 10,000 times GPS power), and they utilize frequencies that easily penetrate buildings and other urban structures. As a result, Rosum’s TV-based positioning system provides reliability and accuracy indoors and in urban canyons where GPS and related technologies fail. Rosum has integrated its TV-based positioning with GPS to provide reliable and accurate position fixes across all environments.
About Rosum
Rosum is the first company to use terrestrial TV signals for the purpose of positioning mobile devices, and the first to develop a joint TV- GPS-based positioning solution for true universal coverage. The Rosum solution is uniquely suited to tracking in urban and indoor location, where GPS and assisted GPS solutions tend to fail. In indoor and urban-area testing, Rosum has shown that its solution meets the FCC’s E911 accuracy requirements. Rosum’s management team includes industry leaders from the GPS, cellular, and television worlds, and the company is venture-backed by leading investors including Charles River Ventures, Allegis Capital, Motorola Inc., KTB Ventures, and Steamboat Ventures. Partners include Trimble Navigation, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture investment arm. More information is available at www.rosum.com.
About Soniya Technologies
Soniya Technologies provides and enables a wide range of mobile sensor-based device services to be delivered via wireless handsets such as cellular phones and wireless PDAs for monitoring, management and control. Soniya Technologies’ Universal Device Service Platform (uDSP™) provides a flexible platform for rapid deployment of applications and management of services by integrating a variety of devices, providing a lower cost per subscriber. Founded in 2003 and privately held, Soniya Technologies’ headquarters is in Fremont, Calif., with offices in Beijing, China. For more information, go to http://www.soniyatech.com or http://www.china.soniyatech.com
Contacts:
Soniya Technologies
Doris Zhuang
Product Marketing Manager
Tel: 510-770-8664
Doris.zhuang@soniyatech.com |
Rosum Corporation
Todd Young
Director of Marketing
Tel: 650-421-4041
tyoung@rosum.com |
