Europe : Virgin Mobile UK and Zi Corporation today announced the first consumer trial of Zi’s newly launched Qix technology. Qix (pronounced “quicks”) is an innovative mobile service discovery engine that combines predictive text and content indexing to enable rapid discovery of contacts, features and services on a mobile smart phone.

Inset shows Qix demo on Nokia 7610.

Qix provides for the first time an intuitive, fast search index for a mobile user, in the same way that an internet search engine like Google or Yahoo helps web surfers find what they are looking for. Qix will be bundled with Virgin Mobile’s Nokia 6630 handsets during spring 2005. The trial will compare service usage and ARPU between subscribers with and without Qix-powered smart phones.

Qix significantly reduces the number of key presses needed to use a phone, thereby enhancing the user experience for the subscriber and simultaneously driving service usage and adoption resulting in greater Average Revenue per User (ARPU). Over time, Qix’s interactive memory remembers new user data, including new URL bookmarks and called numbers for future presentation. It also tracks frequently used personal selections over time and then presents them with priority over other information, providing easy access to favourite items of the user.

Graeme Hutchinson, Sales & Marketing Director at Virgin Mobile, said: “One of the biggest challenges we face is to entice customers to start using the plethora of features and services on their phones, and to use them frequently. We believe that the Qix technology will make all mobile services easier to find and use.”

“As the first completely intuitive service discovery engine, this carrier trial with Virgin Mobile is an important milestone for Qix and a key opportunity to gather first-hand consumer feedback on our product,” said Glen Morgan, senior vice president of global sales and marketing for Zi. “In order to create the ideal customer experience, Zi invested in significant focus group testing when we developed Qix. We are confident that this trial will reinforce our findings and belief that Qix will drive service adoption and subscriber ARPU.”

The trial will utilize the Symbian OS version of Qix.

About Qix
Qix is a compelling new service discovery engine that sits on top of user-platform environments and operating systems. Qix provides a quick and easy method for accessing a phone’s full set of features, applications and services without having to remember where and how to find them via a phone’s built-in menu structure. Qix intuitively accesses a phone’s features directly from the idle/dialing screen using the standard keypad.

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