iTouch launches services by phone in Britain

Wilson and Horton announces...

The wireless services company iTouch, which is 70 per cent owned by Independent News & Media (owners of Wilson and Horton, which publishes the

New Zealand Herald

), today goes live in Britain with its Wap (Wireless Application Protocol) portal offering news and a range of business, sports and entertainment guides.

It will also offer classified advertising, weather, diary, calendar and other services. The portal, which will be the first in Britain to offer live share prices by phone, will be extended this northern autumn to provide a range of personalised messaging services, including message alerts tailored both to the personal interest of the user and his or her location.

Content for the British service comes from a wide variety of sources, including electronic media content providers as well as the group's Independent newspaper.

A similar service was launched in South Africa in March. The company has also launched Wap portals in Ireland, South Africa and New Zealand.

Launches in Australia and Israel will follow shortly.

Customers can access the iTouch portal on both mobile and conventional PCs. The iTouch service will appear as a separate icon on the Vodafone/Vizzavi service which is due to be launched shortly.

Half a million Wap-enabled mobile phones are already in circulation and the number is expected to grow dramatically over the next 12 months.

Ivan Fallon, executive chairman of iTouch worldwide, said yesterday that iTouch was aiming for 2.5 per cent to 5 per cent of the British market. Globally, it is estimated that from a standing start the m-commerce market will reach $US200 billion by 2004.

Mr Fallon said: "The market is exploding. All this is converging with the internet. We are at the cutting edge. Our view is that we are early movers."

He said that as a specialist content provider, backed by an experienced media group, iTouch was in a good position to fill the gaps in the market left by the major mobile data services.

He also said that where others were concentrating almost exclusively on the consumer market, iTouch was one of the few Wap content providers targeting the corporate market, where it believed the commercial potential was far greater than in the business-to-consumer (B2C) market.

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