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WirelessDevNet.com Press Release
Zi Corporation Completes Acquisition of Assets of Decuma AB of Sweden
Calgary, AB and Lund, Sweden, January 26, 2005 – Zi Corporation (Nasdaq: ZICA) (TSX:ZIC), a leading provider of intelligent interface solutions, announced today that it has completed the previously announced acquisition of assets from handwriting recognition software specialists Decuma AB of Lund, Sweden. As part of the acquisition, Zi has acquired the intellectual property and customer agreements of privately held Decuma AB. The purchase price was approximately US$1.0 million paid in newly issued shares of Zi Corporation common stock.
Commenting on the acquisition, Zi Corporation President and Chief Executive Officer Michael D. Donnell emphasized the importance of the Decuma purchase for Zi’s long term expansion plans. “Our strategy of developing software to further simplify and enhance the use of wireless devices will be significantly strengthened by this acquisition.
“Decuma’s handwriting recognition technology will be an important complement to Zi’s market-leading eZiText® and eZiTap™ solutions. We are convinced that the combination of the technologies will further bolster our competitive advantage and increase our market share by enabling us to deliver an expanded suite of innovative products to customers,” added Donnell.
The use of handwriting as an interface on a mobile device such as a PDA or mobile phone is becoming increasingly important with the evolution to 3G multimedia applications and services. The handwriting recognition software created by Decuma, with its patented Geometrical Invariant Technology (GIT), has the ability to recognize an individual’s unique writing style. Other handwriting recognition technologies currently on the market are based on a simplified, one stroke alphabet. The Decuma® solution uses a radically different approach that recognizes the different ways in which people write.
Research by Decuma revealed that writing styles were markedly different between Europe, the Americas and Asia. The Decuma solution enables people to write as they normally would using pen and paper. This is an important breakthrough in normalizing handwriting as a user interface. Decuma technology also enables the implementation of handwriting recognition in character-based languages such as Chinese and Japanese.
The Decuma product portfolio is comprised of three handwriting recognition software products: Decuma alphabetic, for English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and other western languages; Decuma Chinese for Simplified and Traditional Chinese; and Decuma Japanese, which supports Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, English alphabetic characters and Arabic numbers. The company's products are compatible with the Palm operating system, Windows CE and the Symbian operating system.
About Zi Corporation
Zi Corporation (www.zicorp.com) is a technology company that delivers intelligent interface solutions to enhance the user experience of wireless and consumer technologies. Zi provides manufacturers and operators with a full range of intuitive and easy-to-use input solutions; including eZiText for one-touch predictive text entry, eZiTap for intelligent multi-tap entry and Decuma for natural handwriting recognition. The solutions dramatically improve the usability of mobile phones, PDAs, gaming devices and set-top boxes and the applications on them; including, SMS, MMS, e-mail and Internet browsing. Zi’s product portfolio currently supports 41 different language databases, 70 additional language interfaces and the ability to meet input needs in more than 130 countries. Zi supports its strategic partners and customers from offices in Asia, Europe and North America. A publicly traded company, Zi Corporation is listed on the Nasdaq National Market (ZICA) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (ZIC).
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