NetSTAR

TOKYO August 3th, 2004

NetSTAR Inc, the leading company in the Japanese web filtering industry, has confirmed its leadership position as the company increased its share to 30.5% according to the Fuji Chimera Research Institute, Inc. The products, in which NetSTAR provides its URL database, are the “InterSafe” product family (development/distribution by Alps System Integration Co., Ltd.) and the “InterScan WebManager” product family (development/distribution by Trend Micro Inc.).
The total share of these two products will be the share NetSTAR holds in the Japanese web filtering market. This data results from the Fuji Chimera Research Institute report “2004 Network security business research” issued on July 23, 2004.

According to the Fuji Chimera, NetSTAR’s database share in the Japanese web filtering industry of year 2003 was 2.2 billion yen (total share of 30.5%) and expected to be 3.1 billion yen (total share of 33.3%) in 2004. As the coverage of Japanese websites will be the key point in the Japanese web filtering market, NetSTAR holds the largest database acquisition center in Japan, and focuses on collecting
Japanese websites which mainly will be necessary for the companies, public sectors, educational institutes in Japan. Since early-entered US-developed web filtering software products have a weak spot in compiling Japanese websites, they are now on the verge of losing their shares. This research for the web filtering market, finds a majority of companies in Japan, use the NetSTAR’s URL database and we believe this increases our depth expertise in data compilation and classification of Japanese website.

“The key benefit for the quality of web filtering product is the accuracy of the URL database” said NetSTAR executive director, Akira Nakayama. URL filtering products are software that can filter the type of content a web browser displays. The filter checks the content of a web page against a set of rules and replaces any unwanted content with an alternative web page, usually an "Access Denied" page. Therefore, as Nakayama says “An extensive database of categorized web sites will be necessary to restrict or allow access by groups of users or by individuals. NetSTAR maintains this database and provides updated URL lists to the customers.” To lead the top share in this industry means NetSTAR can reflect the customer’s needs and demands more than any other competitor. Therefore, NetSTAR is able to retain the extensiveness of the URL database and the accuracy of the classification better than any other web-filtering provider. NetSTAR will be continuing its efforts in its ongoing creation of the best URL database and filtering engine deployment in a long term basis.

About NetSTAR

NetSTAR Inc is one of the few companies, which hold the technology for database compilation and classification of URLs, as well as a means of updating and delivering the latest URL database to the customers. NetSTAR’s URL lists are automatically acquired through an advanced algorithm, and our dedicated staff of 30 people, which is the largest scale in Japan, visually confirms each website, and then classifies and registers them. Since the company establishment in 2001, NetSTAR’s URL database is being updated everyday, and as of July 2004, NetSTAR’s database contains approximately more than 23 million web pages.
Within the database, the most covered language is Japanese, which is approximately 70%, and the other languages are mainly English, Chinese, Spanish and Korean.

Nowadays, since the Internet use is not only major through the personal computer, but also through mobile phones, NetSTAR is also working on compilation and classification for mobile phone sites in full scale. The company is headquartered in Tokyo Japan, and has the URL database acquisition center in Sendai (Miyagi Prefecture) Japan.

For more information, visit http://www.netstar-inc.com/

About Fuji Chimera Research Institute
Please visit http://www.fcr.co.jp/en/index.html

Copyright(c)2004 NetSTAR Inc. All Rights Reserved. NetSTAR is a trademark of NetSTAR Inc. InterSafe is a trademark of Alps System Integration Co.,Ltd, and TRENDMICRO, InterScanWebManager are trademarks of Trend Micro Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners