NEWS AND EVENTS

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Stargate Capital Management Ltd is pleased to announce that Trapezia, the EIS equity fund dedicated to women focused businesses, has invested in Instant Discounts Limited (IDL) - a technology based company supplying electronic customer retention and payment terminal solutions to independent merchants and businesses throughout the United Kingdom.

The technology can also be integrated to the EPOS system of larger retailers.

IDL offers merchants multi-function payment terminals that not only processes payment cards but also provides a range of value added technologies. IDL's proprietary software, which is installed on the payment terminals and / or integrated to EPOS, delivers an electronically tracked discount, loyalty and voucher/coupon schemes and a pin protected gift card solution.

Gift and loyalty schemes are becoming ever more important in supporting customer loyalty and sustain / grow footfall. However, traditional loyalty and gift card solutions target major retailers and are expensive to operate. With a prohibitive cost of participation, independent merchants either have missed out on the value adding benefits or relied on paper based schemes.

IDL's easy to use, cost effective loyalty and gift card solutions now enable SME's to access the professional schemes previously available to larger merchants.

Founders Neeta Dhorajiwala, CEO and Kaushik Hindocha, Managing Director combine a strong understanding of both the independent merchants sector and larger corporates.

Ms Dhorajiwala explains: "The Instant Discounts technology enables retailers to offer their own customised promotions, instant cash discounts and incentives to their customers, ensuring repeat purchase from the retailer's business. The promotions are fully managed by IDL preventing the retailers incurring the huge set up, running and administration costs of paper voucher promotions and customer retention programmes.

The IDL application is 100% electronic, measurable and operates at the point of sale. Retailers have total control over the type of promotion or discount they want to provide and can select and alter their unique customer offer at any time of the day."

Commenting on the Trapezia investment, Ms Dhorajiwala said: "We are very excited about the partnership with Trapezia. The Stargate Capital team has shown full understanding of the needs and potential of our business. With their investment and support we will be able to pursue our plans to roll out our service and solutions to retailers worldwide."

Venture capitalist Stephan Gagnon, a founder of Stargate Capital and a fund manager on the Trapezia Fund, joins the Board of Instant Discounts. Gagnon said: "Instant Discounts' technologies have many outstanding applications. The combination of affordable, pin protected electronic gift card and customer loyalty solutions, cost effective payment systems and the data mining opportunities generated by the information gathered in regards to customer behaviour provides substantial value to independent and larger retailers. In addition, the strategy of building a terminal estate is risk mitigating as there is an established market for terminal estate owners. We look forward to working with the management in deploying the Instant Discounts business plan."

Ingenico says it has developed the world’s first terminal accepting a payment on an iPod. The invention, which was demonstrated last month at the Cartes 2005 exhibition, uses the company’s i5100 terminal, Atlantic Radio System’s FM data extraction module and Griffin’s iTrip FM transmitter to “communicate with the iPod via the FM band while enabling users to pay for goods using their MP3 player,” according to Ingenico.

“At this past Cartes exhibition, Ingenico demonstrated how, in a hypothetical future, travellers could book plane tickets and receive them via MP3 format by e-mail,” the company explains. “He or she would then just need to store the MP3 receipt on an iPod before going to the airport. When preparing to board, the traveller would simply play the MP3 ticket on the iPod to send all ticket information securely and in real time to the boarding gate. Ticket information might include passport, itinerary and price data as well as pre-encoded biometric features for passenger verification at the gate. The same intuitive, user friendly payment system can also be used for gift vouchers, tickets and virtually all other forms of prepaid transaction.”