NEW YORK, Nov. 7 / ireserve, an ASP providing a full-service reservation and appointment system for local merchants and professional services firms, such as restaurants, beauty salons, health clubs, spas and doctors, announced the release of iPush(TM), a revolutionary, patent-pending technology that was developed in conjunction with the release today of Version 3.0 of the company's software. iPush(TM) allows data to be pushed from the server to the browser client obviating the need for an open connection or client-side refreshing. To illustrate, when a standard transaction on the Internet, an Intranet or Extranet is executed, a user requests a page or information by clicking a link or the browser's Refresh button, the web server receives and processes the request, and finally the server sends the page back to the browser. After the server has sent the page to the client, the communication channel between server and client machines is terminated. There is generally no way for the server to send more information to that particular client until the client makes another request. iPush(TM) makes this communication possible and allows servers to send new data to the appropriate clients as the data changes -- not only when requests are made. In addition, as with some of the exciting new peer-to-peer (P2P) computing technologies in the marketplace, iPush(TM) allows clients to act in a server-like capacity.

The patent-pending technology permits the browser-based environment to support dynamic content rather than the static content that is found on most web sites, which until the advent of iPush(TM) generally had to be updated by client-side refreshing. Although many web sites claim they "push" data to clients, in reality most are actually "pulling" the data. For example, today, when most financial web sites provide a stock quote, that quote is only updated when the user manually refreshes the page or according to pre-determined intervals. With iPush(TM), the stock quote can be updated automatically as soon as the price changes, without the need for the user to refresh the screen. Similarly, B2B marketplaces rely on the ability to present users with time-sensitive data such as pricing and inventory levels. iPush(TM) can provide the users of B2B marketplaces a consistent view of current data, guaranteeing that they receive fresh content when the backend data changes, without requiring refreshing at pre-set intervals that can be taxing on server performance and consume an inordinate amount of bandwidth.

ireserve's CTO, Brandon Hornbeck, explained how the technology works with respect to ireserve's merchant customers who use ireserve's software to automate their reservation/appointment book, "All reservations/appointments are managed on the ireserve central server, whether they are booked online, by phone or in person. So, if a customer calls in for a table for two at 8 p.m. at one of our participating restaurants, the reservationist inputs the information into the touch-screen PC that we provide. But, if an online reservation was processed (prior to the development of iPush(TM)), there was no way for the server to update the browser client with that booking. We just set the browser to refresh every 10 seconds, so in the event an online reservation was made the browser client would be updated. Now, with iPush(TM), the server automatically updates the client only when necessary. iPush(TM) allows the updating of multiple clients that are logged into a shared data source. For example in the case of restaurants, there can be multiple users and client machines on the restaurant floor, in the back office, or even a manager who is logged in remotely from home watching over the business. As new reservations enter the system via a restaurant user or an online customer, the system will immediately push the new reservations to all clients for which the information is relevant."

President and Chief Operating Officer Joe Gawronski, added, "With our customer base of 100+ restaurants, pre-set refreshing was already translating to hundreds of thousands of hits per day on our database server. Needless to say, this was very taxing on our server performance and resulted in unnecessary consumption of bandwidth. We had our technology team search high and low for this technology and they found nothing, so we decided to develop it ourselves."

"Although we developed iPush(TM) in order to improve our own product offerings, we realized right away that this push technology had applicability far beyond our scheduling solutions for local merchants and we plan on licensing the technology to B2C Web sites, B2B marketplaces, ASPs and others who can use it to improve performance and user functionality," added CEO David Kanbar. "In addition to offering a substantial new revenue opportunity, this technology proves once again that ireserve, the first restaurant reservations management provider to launch a browser-based product, is a technology leader."

About ireserve

ireserve is an ASP that automates the reservation book of local merchants and professional services firms such as restaurants, spas, health clubs, beauty salons, tanning salons, doctors and dentists. ireserve's software enables such merchants to more efficiently manage the reservations process, build a database on their customers that results in an enhanced level of service, and provides the information to market their products and services to new and existing customers in a highly targeted manner. ireserve's software also offers a new marketing channel and revenue opportunity for merchants since it interfaces with ireserve's booking engine which, through a number of strategic partnerships, is found on consumer web sites such as Citysearch, Zagat, Transmedia-owned iDine and The Washingtonian. This allows their customers to make online reservations and appointments in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week via their PC, PDA or wireless phone. ireserve offers online reservations at one-hundred restaurants in Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco and Washington DC, as well over seven hundred restaurants in London and Paris through a partnership with , and expects its network of merchants to rapidly expand through a number of planned licensing arrangements. For more information on ireserve visit www.ireserve.com. For more information on iPush(TM), please contact Brandon Hornbeck by email at [email protected].