GTE and PersonalGenie form partnership to create personalized interactive service for family members.

Editor's Note: GTE and PersonalGenie to demonstrate a variety of personalization services during the JavaOne Conference, June 5-9, at the Connected Family booth #114, Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, California.

IRVING, Texas - GTE and PersonalGenie, an application service provider offering intelligent personalization technology for smart devices, portals, content, and e-commerce, today announced a partnership to develop personalized services that make everyday household chores easier for busy families.

The collaborative effort, an enhancement to GTE's Connected Family^SM initiative launched last year, will give busy households a personalized way of receiving and storing information such as to-do lists, information directories and shopping lists.

In GTE's Connected Family environment, smart consumer electronic devices and household appliances share a fast Internet connection and are controlled through an Internet portal. Using PersonalGenie technology, Internet portals, networked devices and services will be personalized, enabling family members to define and receive information that is important to them.

"We want to help consumers access a range of information in a personalized format," said Russ Sivey, director-service planning and development for GTE. "Providing family members with interactive interfaces bearing their own look and feel to the services they subscribe to, provides a higher level of convenience for services that blend into a family's lifestyle."

PersonalGenie supports GTE's vision of the Connected Family lifestyle because the intelligent, flexible technology provides personalization for all of the products, services, information, and devices in the networked home. The technology is based on revolutionary Digital Portrait technology, which characterizes consumers individually, based on personality, interests, and intentions. PersonalGenie uses the portraits to match consumers with products, services, and content, to configure networked devices, and to help consumers plan complex events like vacations, weddings, and births. In the Connected Family environment, PersonalGenie will be used to personalize all aspects of the networked home, including device settings and family portal services such as shopping and calendaring. Because PersonalGenie is an intelligent, adaptive system, the more consumers use the service, the more accurate their personalization becomes.

"Personalization of services will support the evolution of the Connected Family concept and wide-spread adoption of broadband technology," said Sylvia Tidwell Scheuring, PersonalGenie's president and CEO. "PersonalGenie is working with GTE to develop application programming interface (API) definitions for the Connected Family environment. Like universal connectors, these APIs will allow third parties, such as device manufacturers and content providers, to develop services that can be easily 'plugged in' to the Connected Family environment. By partnering with companies who will build these Connected Family services, GTE and PersonalGenie will be able to provide consumers with a very compelling networked home solution."

GTE partnered with PersonalGenie because their technology is consistent with the Connected Family architecture and can be applied to networked devices, content delivery, e-commerce, and any other Internet-enabled product or service in the networked home.

The Connected Family program embraces multiple content and application developers to deliver new services to residential customers that are compliant with the Open Systems Gateway initiative (OSGi). The OSGi specification provides a common foundation for Internet Service Providers, network operators and equipment manufacturers to deliver a wide range of e-services to gateway servers running in the home, small business or remote/branch offices and is available for industry use.

GTE, working with partners, is defining an end-to-end service management process that permits a service hosted on the network to be accessed from the home via the residential gateway. This will enable a third party application provider to provision their application into the GTE framework. Included in the basic OSGi compliant framework are a number of core services that third parties can access for value-added delivery to the home. Such core services include billing, security, list management, personal portals, etc. A developer can engage through the OSGi consortium, through one of GTE's partners or directly with GTE when commercial APIs are available.

About GTE

With 1999 revenues of more than $25 billion, GTE is a leading telecommunications provider with one of the industry's broadest arrays of products and services. In the United States, GTE provides local service in 28 states and wireless service in 18 states, as well as long-distance, directory, and internetworking services ranging from dial-up Internet access for residential and small-business consumers to Web-based applications for Fortune 500 companies. Outside the United States, the company serves customers on five continents. Additional information about GTE can be obtained at www.gte.com.

GTE's community and philanthropic programs target excellence in education, particularly math, science, technology and literacy. GTE also supports job training, delivery of health and human services, and the arts. The company's newest program is GTE Reads, a public charity designed to create public awareness, increase fundraising and support organizations dedicated to improving America's literacy levels. GTE customers can contribute to GTE Reads by checking off a box on their bill. Others can contribute through GTE SuperPages.com (www.superpages.com).

About PersonalGenie

PersonalGenie is an application service provider offering intelligent personalization solutions for smart devices, content, portals, and e-commerce. Companies that use PersonalGenie's technology enjoy a competitive advantage in offering their customers more choice, more convenience, and more personalized service. For more information about PersonalGenie, visit their web site at www.personalgenie.com.

Connected Family is a trademark of GTE Corporation. PersonalGenie and Digital Portrait are trademarks of Personal Genie, Inc.

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