Milamber Digital gets Technology Strategy Board funding

Milamber Digital gets Technology Strategy Board funding

(London, 05 April, 2011): The Milamber Digital Consortium has secured a substantial grant from the Technology Strategy Board to build a next-generation Digital Learning Marketplace (DLM) on which to develop and test-drive a number of state-of-the-art innovations in the use of metadata.

The grant was awarded following a successful application to the Technology Strategy Board’s “Metadata – Increasing the Value of Digital Content” funding competition.

The Consortium consists of Pearson Education, Milamber Consulting, Redtray, 2SMS, Lifecycle, Ashridge Business School and Warwick University.

The aim of Milamber Digital is to create a platform to help increase the value of business learning content to creators, publishers and consumers by making such material more accessible and useable. A key goal is to render digitized learning content into standards-compliant formats for mobile delivery in an app store type model.

“What’s stopping publishers from unlocking the full potential of their learning assets?” asks Andy Hasoon, CEO of Milamber and leader of the Consortium. “A babel of formats, protocols and platforms that do not talk to each other”, he says. And, he adds, “the difficulties of protecting intellectual property….and getting paid”.

The member companies of the Consortium are charged with developing a set of tools to deal with these and other roadblock issues, including:

• a set of extensible translation modules to allow content using various proprietary metadata formats to conform to common internet formats based around recognized standards.

• support for digital watermarking and fingerprinting of multimedia assets to allow tracking of intellectual property rights even when content is broken down and repackaged.

• Provision of reliable semantic search by exploiting detailed metadata, meaning that a DLM user can quickly find relevant material and create tailor-made training content with ease.

• Developing a licensing and rights registry for IP. This will allow owners to submit metadata for ownership and licensing rights in the DLM as well as the tracking, billing and payment of appropriate royalties to content owners.

The total cost of the project is £1,476,000 and the £737, 000 Technology Strategy Board grant is payable over an eighteen month period for delivery against Consortium defined milestones.

The Milamber Digital project begins on 1^st April 2011.

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Note to editors

The Technology Strategy Board is a business-led government body which works to create economic growth by ensuring that the UK is a global leader in innovation. Sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the Technology Strategy Board brings together business, research and the public sector, supporting and accelerating the development of innovative products and services to meet market needs, tackle major societal challenges and help build the future economy. For more information please visit www.innovateuk.org.

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The goal of the DLM is to enable educational publishers to increase the value of their content by developing and deploying key innovations in metadata use. These include searching for content in disparate formats, managing rights and paying royalties.

For further information contact:

Andy Hasoon

Milamber Group Ltd

Email: andy.hasoon@milambergroup.com

Tel: +44 (0) 247 623 6971