WHITAKER ASSOCIATES
Washington DC
7 November 2001

Second European Directory Market Conference to be held in Barcelona

Washington - Whitaker Associates announced that it will hold its European Directory Marketplace 2002 Conference (EDM2002) on February 4-5, 2002, in Barcelona, Spain. The conference and expo will explore major technological and regulatory developments spurring the growth of the Directory Services market in Europe. Gold Sponsors of the conference include InfoNXX (http://www.infonxx.com ); Information Serves extended, Inc.; (ISx) (http://www.isxinc.com ); Philips Speech Processing (http://www.speech.philips.com ); and varetis AG (http://www.varetis.com ). Volt Delta Europe Ltd. is a sponsor as well.

The European Directory Services market is undergoing rapid transition due to several factors:

First, new technologies enable voice access to a wide range of information, not just phone numbers. These include Advanced Speech Recognition, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Short Message Services (SMS), Extensible Markup Language (XML), the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) protocol, and others.

Second, new rules and regulations from the European Union (EU) and country governments are opening directory service markets to competition.

Third, new firms, taking advantage of market openings, are now competing strongly with incumbent operators. In several country markets, competition has already grown with the entrance of companies like telegate AG, Conduit plc, and Sonera.

Fourth, in the face of this new competition, incumbent operators and directory service providers are updating their strategies, business models, and operations to succeed in the rapidly evolving marketplace. The generally troubled state of the telecommunications sector has only contributed to the pressure for change.

The upcoming EDM2002 conference is especially timely in view of the just- issued regulations in the United Kingdom and similar directives under consideration in Spain, which aim to open competition by creating new telephone access codes (in a "118xy" or "118xyz" format) to permit firms other than incumbent telephone carriers to offer Directory Inquiry services to the general public.

Whitaker Associates is organising its second conference in partnership with the Association for the European Interworking of Directory Inquiry Services (EIDQ) (http://www.eidq.org ). Based in Zurich, the EIDQ is an association of Directory Inquiry service provider firms in Europe. The first conference, held early this year in London, attracted key industry decision-makers from over fifty organisations and fifteen countries.

Contact information:
Stuart M. Whitaker
+1 (703) 506-1220 - voice
+1 (703) 506-1221 - fax
info@whitaker.com