Gemalto Nominated for Seven Awards at CARTES 2006 Tradeshow.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- Gemalto, a world leader in digital security, today announced its seven nominations for Sesames Awards at this year's CARTES tradeshow, demonstrating its leadership in secure personal devices, user centric software and value added services.

The Sesames Awards are a key part of the annual smart card industry event. They celebrate the unique contribution and investment of leading industry players like Gemalto in developing next generation products and solutions for the digital age.

GemBorder Inlay (Sesame "Hardware") is a new Radio Frequency antenna solution that enhances the power yield of the link between the contactless device and its associated reader. Based on a tri-dimensional design, unlike the more classical bi-dimensional designs found with current technologies, the new inlay reduces the wire diameter of the antenna (typically by 30%) while increasing the effective physical section of the antenna and minimizing its impedance. In a near future, this new technology will allow for the production of a high quality factor antenna with an extremely thin copper wire or any other conductive material.

The innovation of "IPv6 embedded stack" (Sesame "Software") lies in the implementation of an IPv6 communication stack in a smart card integrating a high-speed protocol communication interface. The growing trend towards converging all means of communication - data, voice and video - to a single protocol clearly demonstrated that the IPv4 address space could not meet the needs of an ever-increasing demand for IP connected devices. Besides providing a tremendous number of additional IP addresses, IPv6 brings significant enhancements such as autoconfiguration and built-in security for data protection. This innovation definitely makes the smart card a fully-fledged network citizen in this new connected world.

PC-Link.sim (Sesame "Software") is a Windows OEM application for mobile subscribers intended to ease management and sharing of multimedia content and SIM card contacts. PC-Link.sim enables synchronization of the subscriber's phonebook stored on the SIM and his PC contact list. Leveraging the SIM card strong security features and turning the handset into a secure One-Time-Password token, the mobile network operator is now able to deliver a wide range of valuable Internet services directly to the subscriber's PC. As an example, by simply connecting his handset to his PC, the subscriber is granted access to highly secure online transactions.

GemInstant Sticker (Sesame "Banking/Finance/Retail") appears like a regular contactless payment card but is much smaller in size. Its adhesive side allows to stick it onto any surface, making it possible to create trendy contactless payment means with innovative form factors. With GemInstant Sticker, any personal object, such as the mobile phone, can provide the convenience of contactless payment. The booming trend towards contactless makes GemInstant Sticker a considerable business opportunity for payment cards issuers.

FireFly (Sesame "Customer Loyalty") is a pioneering technology intended to give contactless cards a compelling visual effect. When the cards are waved in front of a reader, a light source is activated in the card body, generating amazing effects in the plastic. The light source is directly powered by the contactless reader, without the need to include a battery into the card. For example, FireFly makes it possible to have the issuer logo glow every time the card is used, thus providing a greatly differentiating feature.

ChipSwipe (Sesame "e-Transactions") is a pocket handheld reader used to dynamically encode the magnetic stripe with the cryptographic data computed by the EMV chip, before every magnetic stripe transaction. Once encoded, the card can work with any standard payment terminal, worldwide, without any modification. The cryptographic data on the magstripe contributes to preventing the card from being counterfeited.

SIM Strong (Sesame "IT Security") leverages the ubiquity of SIM equipped mobile devices to provide secure access to online content and services. A user with a valid Identity Provider account and SIM enabled mobile phone, dongle or GPRS PC card can easily and securely log on to a host of online services such as e-commerce or Intranet. The service implements open standards and is easily deployable and scalable.

About Gemalto

Gemalto (Euronext NL 0000400653 GTO) is a leader in digital security with pro forma 2005 annual revenues of $2.2 billion, operations in 120 countries and 11,000 employees including 1,500 R&D engineers. The company's solutions make personal digital interactions secure and easy in a world where everything of value -from money to entertainment to identities- is increasingly represented as bits and bytes communicated over networks.

Gemalto thrives on creating and deploying secure platforms, portable and secure forms of software in highly personal objects like smart cards, SIMs, e-passports, readers and tokens. More than a billion people worldwide use the company's products and services for telecommunications, banking, e-government, identity management, multimedia content, digital rights management, IT security and other applications. Gemalto was formed in June 2006 by the combination of Axalto and Gemplus International S.A. For more information please visit www.gemalto.com.