Incard MUSE Platform Chosen by Telecom Italia to Support Web Based SIM Services

GENEVA, June 29, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Incard, a leader in smart cards for the mobile telecom industry worldwide and a division of STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM), is supplying smart SIM cards and technical support enabling Telecom Italia to develop exciting new services for its mobile subscribers, hosted on the handset.

Incard's MUSE (Multimedia USIM Environment) family of SIMs support Smart Card Web Server (SCWS) technology, a new standard enabling visually appealing, graphical web-style SIM services on cellphones and smartphones. Telecom Italia is also using Incard's technical expertise to support its migration from legacy text-based services to the SCWS web-server application environment. The MUSE family also provides the flexibility to deploy NFC contactless services in the future.

As one of the world's leading telecom operators, Telecom Italia is the first to launch SCWS SIM cards for its handsets. These now provide the company with a platform to roll out new SIM-based services for subscribers, accessed via a user-friendly web-style environment featuring icons, images and hyperlinks. Services will include enhanced multimedia, Telecom Italia web portal directly on the SIM card, over-the-air updating of SIM-based web content, improved address book management, secure handling of information, online-style technical help and mobile advertising.

Throughout the project, Incard has preserved coexistence of new SCWS applications with the legacy SIM services. This gives Telecom Italia the flexibility to offer the classic text interface, where preferred, while allowing a smooth migration with continued use of existing infrastructures and servers.

"We are delighted that Telecom Italia has chosen to partner with Incard, and the success of this project confirms our position as a leading provider of advanced SIM solutions," said Michele Scarlatella, Vice-President of Marketing at Incard. "Our MUSE family provides a powerful and flexible platform for customers to develop best-in-class services."

Further Technical Information

SCWS is a new standard defined by the OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) and ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute). It provides an updated platform for SIM services compared to the widely used SIM Toolkit (STK), an older standard that presents a text-based user interface. SCWS allows operators to increase subscriber revenues by adding new and exciting services that were simply not possible using STK, and also to benefit from the large ecosystem of web developers and content when creating new services. The browser-like interface of SCWS has high visual appeal, in keeping with today's sleek handset designs, and enables users to access offline services as intuitively as using the web.

Incard's MUSE family is a Java Card™ product developed on top of STMicroelectronics' ST33F1M hardware architecture, which uses a powerful ARM® SecurCore® SC300™ 32-bit RISC processor. This high-performance core provides the key to supporting SCWS SIM services using Incard's WebServer technology, the NFC (Near-Field Communication) single-wire protocol and advanced asymmetric cryptography that mobile network operators need to deliver innovations such as advanced SIM services, mobile contactless payments or transport applications for their customers.

About Incard

A member of the STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) group, Incard is a leading smart-card manufacturer, offering a complete range of products for Telecommunications, Payment, Transport, Healthcare, Loyalty, and Identity markets. With its know-how and proven expertise, Incard has gained the trust of a global customer base in the different sectors of smart-card solutions with a full range of flexible products, where security and portability are the key factors. Further information on Incard can be found at www.incard-sa.com.

SOURCE Incard