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ATX Teams With Alpine to Deliver PC Connectivity to the Car

24 February 2000

ATX Technologies Teams With Alpine to Deliver PC Connectivity to the Car In Automotive OEM Trial

    DALLAS, Feb. 23 -- ATX Technologies, Inc. (ATX)
(http://www.atxtechnologies.com), the pioneer and leading independent provider
of telematics services to the automotive and wireless markets, announced today
that it has successfully concluded testing of 24-hour downloading of text-
format e-mail and other messaging services to vehicles.  The testing
culminates nearly a year of research and development coordinated between ATX
and Alpine Electronics of America (http://www.alpine1.com).  The service is
now available for automotive OEM trial.
    With the proposed ATX service, telematics subscribers can go online to a
personal telematics Web page where they can select which folders from their
home and/or office PC they want forwarded to their vehicle, such as e-mail,
contacts, or reminders.  The information is delivered to the vehicle in text-
format and displayed on an Alpine navigation screen.
    "What we have successfully done is connect the car to the desktop without
having to integrate a microprocessor into the vehicle," said Steve Millstein,
president, ATX Technologies, Inc.
    Under current hardware conditions, text messages can be up to
247 characters, and up to four pages of text can be stored on the system.
Motorists testing the trial feature have used it for such things as basic
e-mail, urgent messages, shopping lists, and finding addresses.
    "Alpine is out to offer the best Mobile Multimedia products to the
marketplace," said Jim O'Neill, executive vice president, Alpine Electronics
of America.  "As the leader in navigation product development and marketing,
Alpine is committed to delivering products that are the most technically
advanced yet easy to use and safe to operate in a moving vehicle.  By working
with ATX to add the text messaging feature to the navigation system, we're
making it easier for people to keep up their communications in a vehicle."
    "What we're offering to OEMs today reflects our philosophy that we need to
put more functionality in our response centers and less in the car," said
Millstein.  "It's a client-server environment with more intelligence in the
server.  This results in a less expensive hardware solution for the
manufacturer and provides them with greater flexibility in adding new services
at a later time with less hardware concerns."
    While the current system being tested allows motorists to read text on an
in-vehicle display, ATX plans to deliver services via interactive, text-to-
speech technology, or essentially "reading" a message in an electronic voice.
Replies also will be sent verbally, either in the form of an attached audio
file or translated to text by a voice recognition system.