Alltel Wireless and Ontela Launch Service to Automatically Save Photos

SEATTLE — Alltel Wireless, America's largest network, has teamed with Ontela to bring their customers PhotoCopter, a breakthrough service that finally unlocks the photos trapped inside their phones. PhotoCopter saves every camera phone picture customers snap to their home computers and favorite web photo albums. PhotoCopter automatically transfers the taken picture to the PC -- with no extra buttons to push.

[1]The PhotoCopter service is exclusively available to Alltel customers with the Motorola V3m, V3a, V9m and ROKR for $2.99/month, providing customers with unlimited picture transfer to their PC, email address, and web photo albums including Photobucket, Flickr, Blogger, and Snapfish.

"Alltel realizes that our customers are capturing amazing memories on their camera phones, but until now, they have not had an easy way to transfer them to a PC for printing or sharing," said Craig Kirkland, director of messaging and voice products at Alltel Wireless. "PhotoCopter is a simple to use application that will allow our customers to get the most of their phone's camera and enjoy their photos in any setting."

"We're excited to be working with Ontela and Alltel Wireless to enable photo upload services from Alltel customers to our social networking site, Photobucket," says John Smelzer, SVP & GM Mobile, Fox Interactive Media. "As camera phones become ever more critical, at the edge of the social network, the PhotoCopter service becomes an irreplaceable agent for the new generation of user created content."

"It doesn't even feel like software," said Dan Shapiro, CEO of Ontela. "You just take the pictures and as if by magic, they appear on your computer in your 'My Pictures' folder. This is the end of the 'photo graveyard,' where people take pictures and then leave them on the phone until they're deleted. Instead, we've given a new life to these memories by saving them to the places users care about most."

The PhotoCopter service addresses a widespread problem for camera phone owners: it is often difficult to get pictures off of a camera phone. On a typical phone model, it requires 100 keystrokes to get ten pictures transferred to a PC. While a recent Ontela study reported that 93 percent of camera phone users want to save their pictures to their home computer, only 24 percent of camera phone users can actually do it.

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About Alltel Wireless

Alltel is owner and operator of the nation's largest wireless network and has more than 12 million wireless customers. For more information, please visit www.alltel.com.

About Ontela

Ontela provides technology infrastructure to wireless carriers that allows consumers to unlock the photos in their camera phones. Founded by veterans from Microsoft, Real Networks and Expedia in 2005, Ontela is an innovator in mobile imaging headquartered in Seattle, WA. The company's patent-pending PicDeck(TM) platform allows carriers to connect camera phones to imaging services, online albums, and PCs with just a shutter click. For more information, visit www.ontela.com [2].