Gravitate Inc. Tuesday revealed it is partnering with Simplylook Inc. in a bid to upgrade the quality of wireless Internet imaging delivery and offer richer wireless content for location-based mobile services.
Gravitate, based in South San Francisco and Simplylook of San Jose, Calif., will offer its Location Precise streaming, interactive image service for users of Internet-enabled wireless communication devices.
Under the terms of the partnership, Simplylook will completely integrate its streaming, interactive image software technology into the Gravitate Platform.
To be marketed as a core element of the Gravitate Platform, the total package will be sold to original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and infrastructure providers, carriers and network operators, and application service providers (ASP) or content providers. Gravitate expects to make the product available to its customers before the end of the first quarter of 2001.
“The inherent issues surrounding wireless services has been the poor quality level of images being sent to a wireless device,” said John Trobough, chief executive officer of Gravitate.
“We have found that users are requesting richer content, such as maps and detailed images. Simplylook imaging software makes available some 3G (Third Generation) wireless capabilities even before 3G network infrastructure deployments. With the advanced Simplylook technology integrated into the Gravitate Platform, we offer the first total package that addresses this critical user need.”
Simplylook software automatically optimizes images for the screen sizes and resolutions of most wireless devices. It determines the type of device requesting the image and sending the appropriate image for that device. The software also serves up interactive images that allow the user to zoom in/out, pan around the image and access additional information linked to that image.
“Just as wired Internet usage exploded when interactive graphics became an inherent part of browsing, we believe that wireless Internet usage will grow exponentially with the ability to look at high-quality graphics and interactive images,” said Rajit Gadh, founder and chairman of Simplylook. “Using the image streaming and caching technology developed by Simplylook, combined with the Gravitate Platform, we feel we can truly enhance the user experience.”
