Zappware nominated for prestigious iTV award at Milia
15/02/2005

Zappware is pleased to inform you that our 'T-Government applications' have received two nominations for the prestigious "iTV Awards", in the categories 'Best Stand Alone Service' and 'Best Technology'.

The "iTV Awards Gala" ceremony organized by AFDESI will be held during MipTV / Milia, on Wednesday evening in the Hotel Majestic in Cannes.

Zappware submitted two more applications: the iTV Games Portal, in the categories "Best Games" and "Best Innovation" and the Portal and EPG service developed for cable operator Telenet in the category "Best Stand Alone Service". All three applications (and many more...) will be demonstrated on the Zappware booth at Milia.
Zappware invites you to our booth, RSV 15 in the Riviera Sea View area. You are most welcome to visit us there from Monday, 11 April until Friday, 15 April.
The T-Government services as developed by Zappware were an initiative of the government of the Belgian region Flanders, and executed in the so-called "Flanders Interactive" project on the cable networks of Telenet and Interkabel. The government, recognizing that a large portion of its citizens does not have access to Internet services, has turned to the Interactive Television to supply similar services to these 'not connected'. In this way they hope to bridge the 'digital divide' between the citizens. At this moment the following services are available:

• "Lokale Besturen": information database of a large number of local municipalities
• "VDAB": Job Search with more than 30000 available jobs, daily updated
• "Vlaamse Infolijn": information service from the Flanders Government
• "De Lijn": a complete door-to-door planner for all travel with the regional public transport

The nominations for the T-Government services highlight some unique aspects of the services. This is one of the very first nominations for a application developed in MHP (MultiMedia Home Platform). Zappware has been able to demonstrate with this application that it is possible to develop a very performing application in a relatively short timeframe.
Furthermore, the nomination recognizes the importance of the 'icTV Gateway' technology, a proprietary development by Zappware. icTV Gateway enables the easy creation of a variety of Interactive Television applications. The 'iTV Games Portal' as mentioned above also uses this icTV Gateway technology. The icTV Gateway technology is a client-server solution consisting of a mini-browser in the set-top box combined with a scalable server infrastructure in the head-end. The mini-browser allows for navigating and rendering content with minimal consumption of set-top box resources. The server infrastructure takes care of translating high-level application descriptions into highly-efficient MHP code.
icTV Gateway also consists of a flexible and optimized system for linking the iDTV application with existing database back-ends, allowing a quick migration of existing applications to an iDTV platform.
Zappware is an IDTV production house, designing, developing and integration innovative interactive TV-applications for agencies, advertisers, and brands, content suppliers, TV-production companies, broadcasters and network operators.
Zappware specializes in:

• interactive (portal) services & TV sites
• interactive advertising
• enhanced television and interactive TV formats
• iTV games formats
• T-Government applications
• interactive platform applications (EPG, VoD, Mail, Chat, IM)
• related products and systems