NetSTAR

TOKYO May 13, 2009

TOKYO—May 13, 2009—NetSTAR, Inc., Japan’s premier developer of URL filtering product technologies and related services, today announced that it will intensify its efforts to improve its filtering URL lists and its list creation system to meet changing customer expectations for URL filtering.
 
　NetSTAR's URL lists are uniquely optimized for the Japanese market—with precision category criteria that reflect Japan's legal and cultural environment as well as user needs—and Japanese websites account for up to 70% of the recorded URLs. In addition, we are recognized for our quality because we emphasize broad applicability in each of our URL lists, rather than product modules, to meet the needs of our diverse range of partners, and we place importance on reducing false positives, the unnecessary blocking of sites that may be useful for businesses.
　Conventionally, the category criteria applied to URL filtering lists reflect the greatest common concerns of the various customers using filtering. NetSTAR's mission is to reflect the concerns of our users in our filtering criteria quickly once a need has been identified and to provide our users with lists that contain the largest possible number of websites in each of the corresponding categories.
　With the dramatic increase in consumer-generated media (CGM) sites and the filtering obligations set forth in the Internet Control Law, there are drastic environmental changes for filtering. Our response to these environmental changes is a proactive approach to URL lists as outlined below.

1) Emphasis on user feedback
　We have established a dedicated website with an interactive interface to receive suggestions for improvements. We will continue the robust development of our lists and will quickly reflect feedback from users all over the country, including through the usual product support desk. We will employ user surveys and interviews to grasp the filtering needs of our users. 

2) Active improvement of category criteria
　We will continue to learn from the knowledge and experience of experts in specialized fields and improve our system to provide our users—whether corporate or individual—with the category criteria they need.

3) Technological development to ensure coverage that is as broad as possible
　To deal with the increasing number of CGM and other sites that require filtering, we will be putting more effort into technological development in fields related to the processes involved with URL collection, categorization, and distribution.

4) Emphasis on reducing false positives
　We will segment each level of a site to be as thorough as possible in our checking and recording of URLs because we feel it is important to minimize false positives, which prevent users from viewing sites that they should be able to view. By using a proper balance of technological techniques and visual confirmation by our expert staff, we will record a wider range of sites while working to reduce the ratio of false positives.

NetSTAR will continue to collaborate with various partners in an effort to provide the global community with safe Internet access across a wide variety of platforms.

About NetSTAR, Inc, and URL Lists
　NetSTAR specializes in the development of URL filtering software and services, and in the collection, categorization, and delivery of URL lists. NetSTAR URL lists are used in a number of market-leading products like InterSafe by Alps System Integration Co., Ltd., and InterScan and WebManager by Trend Micro Incorporated.  Recognized for its high performance and low false positive ratio, our products are number one (*1) among large companies with strict quality requirements, including approximately 60% of prefectural governments, 40% of central governments, and 40% of the companies in the Nikkei Excellent Company Ranking. We also have a greater than 40% share of the market nationwide. (*2)
NetSTAR's URL lists are now being used in security appliance products and routers for small- and medium-size businesses, and many individual customers are using them through our home-use filtering services. Over the years, NetSTAR has gained much recognition for the broad applicability of its individual URL lists as well as the quality and reliability of its collection, categorization, and delivery processes. NetSTAR’s URL lists for filtering services have been adopted by all mobile phone operators in Japan. (*3)

* 1. Based on NetSTAR's research *2. According to Fuji Chimera Research Institute *3. We distribute new lists daily for use in the filtering systems of NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, Softbank Mobile, WILLCOM, and EMOBILE.

Copyright
　NetSTAR is a registered trademark of NetSTAR, Inc. Other product and company names are the registered trademarks of their respective companies.