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Advanced Multilingual Text Capabilities Available for Asian SVG Developers

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, 21st June 2006 - Ikivo AB, the leading provider of SVG software solutions for mobile devices, and Monotype Imaging Inc., a global provider of font and imaging software technologies, have partnered to introduce scalable, multilingual text capabilities into multimedia SVG products for the mobile phone market. The partnership brings text character support for Hindi, Thai, Arabic, Chinese and many other Asian languages, previously unsupported.

Ikivo's Mobile SVG products enable application developers and Mobile Operators to build rich MultiMedia applications utilizing the full strength of Mobile SVG. In combination with commercially available content design and development tools, such as Ikivo Animator and Adobe Creative Suite 2, Mobile SVG offers the most capable and fastest growing 2D graphical technology for the mobile world.

"Given the explosive growth in emerging markets such as China, India, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa, the ideal font solution must provide intelligence to automatically interpret linguistic traits that are part of complex writing systems," said Bradley Sipes, vice president of operations and chief technology officer of Ikivo. "We look forward to working closely with Monotype Imaging in bringing multimedia SVG, advanced font and multilingual capabilities to low, mid and high-end mobile devices, and leveraging our base of over 60 million Ikivo powered mobile phones that are in circulation today."

"Our work with Ikivo has shown impressive results in rendering and displaying multilingual text within Ikivo's SVG-based technologies," said John Seguin, senior vice president and general manager of Monotype Imaging's Display Imaging group. "Script-related capabilities that were previously unrefined or unavailable within SVG, such as support for Hindi, are included in our solution that integrates with Ikivo's offerings. Through the use of high-quality scalable fonts and advanced multilingual text features, new opportunities will emerge for handset manufacturers, wireless operators, content creators and application providers for differentiating and improving the quality of their products or services for national, regional or global markets."

Monotype Imaging's iType font engine, based on the TrueType and OpenType industry-standard font formats, has been integrated into the Ikivo SVG Player, offering developers of low- to high-end feature phones a multimedia client framework solution complete with scalable font support. In addition, the Ikivo Animator content authoring tool includes support for the iType rasterizer, giving content developers access to the client framework environment within the content creation workflow process.

The Ikivo products will also feature Monotype Imaging's WorldType™ Layout Engine, a modular software library that enables the on-screen composition, positioning and rendering of multilingual text, including complex scripts. The technology handles various intricacies of composition and layout such as bi-directional text flow, contextual character substitution and positioning, ligatures, accents and the intermixing of text and graphics.

Demonstrations of the Ikivo/Monotype integrated solution will take place at CommunicASIA from the 20th to 23rd June 2006.