Milamber Blog

Here is a copy of our recent shareholder presentation.

INTELLEGO HOLDINGS PLC (‘Intellego’ or ‘the Company’) – Acquisition of Digital Learning Marketplace

The Board of Intellego, the AIM traded digital learning business, is delighted to announce it has entered into a non-binding memorandum of understanding (“MOU”) to acquire an investment in the Digital Learning Marketplace (“DLM”) project from Milamber Limited. There are two phases; development and commercial exploitation.

Development – the DLM is being built as a revolutionary new learning platform intended to allow Corporations, SME businesses, and professionals to access their day-to-day and future learning requirements with the goal of helping them improve their business performance.  The Directors of Intellego believe that the DLM will be the first source of truly personalised learning giving users the ability to create their own focused courses in affordable blocks, built from materials supplied by a diverse range of providers.  It will enable the owners of learning content to trade and monetise their learning assets.  Participants in the project include Pearson Education (19%) and Ashridge Business School (6%).  The DLM is designed to have global appeal, with engaging content available in small “bite-sized” units that are easily accessible, and affordable.

The Consortium partners will (pro rata to their respective interests in the project) receive a £740,272 grant from the UK Government’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB) (“Grant”), such is the importance of digital learning to the future education needs within the UK, to provide funds to help the Company finance the development of the DLM platform. The Consortium partners have agreed to match-fund the Grant giving the project a total investment of £1,498,224.

Commercial exploitation – the DLM is expected to be fully operational in 2013, in the interim there will be limited scale commercial trials and testing.

The proposed arrangements comprise an initial investment of up to £160,000 to secure a majority interest in the project during the two year development stage followed by Intellego’s option to maintain this interest into the exploitation stage.  If for any reason Intellego decides not to exercise the option then Milamber has undertaken to buy-back the Interest from Intellego for an amount equal to Intellego’s investment save for the first payment of £40,000.

Milamber, in which Andy Hasoon is a 21% shareholder, (Intellego’s CEO and Director) owns a 6.86% interest in Intellego (40,000,000 ordinary shares of 0.05p).  Accordingly, the transaction is a Related Party Transaction as defined by the AIM Rules.

The independent Directors of Intellego (being all the Directors with the exception of Andy Hasoon) having consulted with the Company’s Nominated Adviser, consider that the terms of the MOU are fair and reasonable insofar as the Company’s shareholders are concerned.

Angus Forrest, Chairman of Intellego said: “The investment in the DLM is our first major transitory move into being a pure digital learning provider. We are excited by the opportunity, that Andy Hasoon has brought to us, which has the potential to transform Intellego into a global player, and consider that the transaction provides a structured approach for Intellego Shareholders to participate in that opportunity”.

Andy Hasoon, CEO of Intellego said: “As the education market aligns ever more closely with online content and learning, the DLM has created a strategy which will ensure it remains the leader of this exciting and revolutionary step change. We promise our customers around the world that we will provide the most comprehensive, relevant and enjoyable learning experiences available.”

-ends-

For further information:

Intellego Holdings plc

Angus Forrest, Chairman                                                                           020 8977 8744

Andy Hasoon, CEO

Beaumont Cornish Limited (Nomad)                                                     020 7628 3396

Roland Cornish

Rivington Street Corporate Finance (Broker)                                       020 7562 3357

Jon Levinson

Allenby Capital Limited (Broker)                                                             020 3328 5656

Nick Naylor / Nick Athanas

Leander (Financial PR)                                                                             07795 168 157

Christian Taylor-Wilkinson

NOTES TO EDITORS

About Intellego

Intellego is a digital learning company which specialises in the provision of productivity improvement, compliance and process change using training to provide the solutions.  The appropriate solution may be digital learning or instructor lead, or blended learning a mix of the two, to regulated industries and distributed workforces.

At the weekend we hosted our first ever Hackathon in London to promote the development of innovative and commercial mobile Apps.

The Autumn Hackathon was the first in a quarterly series of digital technology hack days bringing together developers from the UK and Europe to pool their talents in a competitive environment to create new applications for the booming mobile and social networking platforms. The event was held from 9am on Saturday morning, with the developers coding through the night to 5pm on Sunday at CentralWorking.com – the trendy, boutique co-working club off Tottenham Court Road in central London. 

A panel of leading entrepreneurs, VCs and developers judged the competition, awarding prizes in two main categories: The most innovative App and the App with the best commercial potential. The winners of the Autumn Hackathon were each awarded prizes of £2,000 of legal services from law firms Irwin Mitchell and ADL Legal, plus Chrome Laptops for each team:

Most Innovative App: an iPhone Lightsabre, designed by Kornel Lesinski using the iPhone’s gyroscopic capabilities and neural network technology, he created a multiplayer lightsabre game that links to a TV.

Best Commercial App: A top ‘Trump’ education game, designed by Team Trump Trifecta that allows different skins to be applied to the card sets to provide multiple game types. Quality tested and played by a five year old, the team proved the game worked and engaged its audience.  

Intellego will be running the Winter Hackathon in late January 2012 which will focus on mobile Apps for the estimated 2 million visitors to the London Olympics next Summer.

Andy Hasoon, CEO of Intellego, commented, “We are delighted to be the lead sponsors of the Hackathon events. Intellego is all about promoting educational development through digital, online and mobile technology, so working with some of Europe’s leading App developers has been an exciting experience for us.”

Judges including leading entrepreneurs & developers awarded prizes including £2000 worth of legal services from a top technology law firm. Entries will be judged on innovation, commercial potential, usefulness & fun factor.

To encourage greater involvement of those in further & higher education, teams are limited to three members but allowed a fourth member who is a full time student.

4 of our Hack Teams

Checking quality of one of our Hacks – it worked!

One of the teams at 9am Sat and at 3pm Sun…..did they move?

The Winners

Kornel Lesinski – aka Hack Winner

- Created a game that reads gyroscope data from iPhone – Creating an iPhone Light Sabre on the TV screen via (http://pornel.net:8000/watch.html)

 - Uses ‘pusher.com’ a websocket api

- Bounced data from iPhone to US to Germany (where his servers are) to US to iPhone

- He created a neural network and had to train his system to recognise moves i.e. Over 400+ moves needed programming so iPhone and Neural Network recognise gestures made with iPhone  

- Works as multiplayer game.

Watch Video! Click here……….. Hackathon Final

Organised by Milverton Wallace for Milamber Digital.

(London, 10 March, 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 , Redtray, 2SMS, Lifecycle Software, 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 May 2011.

End

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.  

1) Capsule para:

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

Here is the article that TSB released to announce the overall funding for the competition.

http://www.innovateuk.org/content/press-release/new-research-and-development-will-address-challeng.ashx

Voting at Learning without Frontiers has now opened and I’d invite you all to vote…. for Makrini!

PIXELearning are constantly talking about Makrini™. Why? Becasue its a great product developed for Global Novations, a US provider of Diversity and Inclusion, Marketing and Talent optimization services. Makrini™ is a breakthrough approach to diversity and inclusion training, being the first-ever gaming simulation on the topic.

Being the first of its kind the species of Makrini™ are wanting to get noticed, hence its entry for Innovation Award at Learning without Frontiers.  For information about voting please see below.

Aimed at a wide corporate audience the simulation tasks the learner with a mission to a commercial space station where diversity and inclusion skills must be applied to interact productively with intergalactic associates, and to attain better business results than competitors.

It’s a learning simulation of self discovery based on the learners own preferences, decisions, critical thinking, opinions and beliefs.

The key learning objectives of Makrini™ are:

• Increase personal diversity awareness and inclusive behaviors.
• Increase understanding of the business impact of diversity
• Recognize one’s own perceptions and biases that may limit inclusive behaviors
• Develop the knowledge and skills to build solid business relationships across dimensions of diversity.

VOTING

There are two ways to vote for Makrini™.

For the UK: Using the code [MAKRINI] cast your votes via SMS or Skype SMS* to 07950 080 667

For the USA: Using the code [MAKRINI] cast your votes via SMS or Skype SMS* to +44 7950 080 667

Multiple votes from the same number for the same finalist will count as a single vote, so no funny business ok?

*Votes are charged at your standard network rate and votes the UK may attract an additional network charge. To make it fair each mobile vote from outside of the UK will count as 2 votes. If you’re outside the UK you may find it’s cheaper to use Skype.

Award for INCLUSION: Worlds of Makrini, Global Novations, USA [MAKRINI]

Please circulate ! 

If you want to see Makrini in action e-mail helen.axe@pixelearning.com

Yeah – we got the following e-mail from TSB on Friday!

Technology Strategy Board

Metadata – Increasing the Value of Digital Content

Project Title: Milamber Digital

Thank you for submitting your Expression of Interest (EOI) application for funding to the Technology Strategy Board’s Metadata – Increasing the Value of Digital Content Competition.  The assessment process as outlined in the ‘Guidance for Applicants’ is now complete and I am pleased to advise you that your EOI Application has been successful and you are now invited to submit a Full Application to the Programme.

The Milmaber Digital Consortium decided in Sept 2010 that before we do another EU STREP funding application (the one we want to do is in April 2011) we will be making an application to the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) Metadata Competition. http://www.innovateuk.org/content/competition/metadata-increasing-the-value-of-digital-content-m.ashx

We had some good news through and our draft application has been confirmed by TSB that we are within scope for the Technology Strategy Board ‘Metadata’ competition (good start since these things are very vague) and the formal entry called and Expression of Interest will now be submitted on Thursday 21^st October.

We are just finishing up the budget and final wording it will then go through a final spelling, grammar and polish check.

This competition is a 2 phase process: We have to submit an expression of interest if that is successful we will be told by the 5^th Nov and then we must submit a full application.

Timeline below:

Deadline for submission of compulsory expression of interest 21 October 2010

Decision to applicants 5 November 2010

Deadline for submission of full-stage applications 16 December 2010

Decision to applicants 21 January 2011

There is a currently £4.4m of grant funding being allocated to winning parties for these larger mainstream projects.

This is to let you know that our Consrtium Milamber CDO just missed out in securing the EC funding this time round. We were very close – 16th out of 137 applications of which 12 were funded so we missed out by just 4 places as the results below show.

The good news is we will be re-entering into the next Call to make another submission. As the saying goes if at first you don’t succeed try again – especially when we got so close!

The results on this Call are as follows:

Like all things applying for funding is at some level a numbers game – a total of Euro56m was allocated to this Call for STREP and IP Research Projects – this funding covered several Research Themes in the areas of digital preservation, digital libraries and cultural heritage. In the end it seems that greater than half the Call Value went to the larger projects classified as ‘IP’ projects. This left an estimated €25m to fund the various STREP projects.

There were two areas that covered STREP projects;

Digital Preservation – Advanced Preservation Scenarios.

Cultural Heritage – Advanced Cultural Experiences.   

In total an unprecedented 137 applications were made in our area (it seems that due to the lack of funding in the world in these times the volume of applications rose substantially from the norm).

Typically for a given Call a score of 12 would have been sufficient to get funded, however, in this call in total only 12 Projects (including IP and STREP) were funded and a score of 13.5 was necessary.

PERA were genuinely shocked at the level of applications and the score required to secure funding unfortunately we had no control over the quality or quantity of rival bids.

And to get a sense of just how close it was for us we were ranked 16^th out 137 for all the STREP and IP applications and of those only 12 were funded so we missed out by just 4 places. 

Quick Highlights.

1. 137 proposals were submitted to our objective (6.4.1) of which 92 were STREPs.
2. The EC retained the top 12 proposals out of the 137, and required a score of 13.5 in order to get funding.
3. Milamber CDO came 16^th out of 137.
4. Out of the top 12, 7 STREPs were funded and 5 Integrating Projects (IPs).
5. Milamber CDO came 11^th in the STREPs.

Thanks to all the team and the Consortium for all their hard work – we shall see if we can get better luck in the Autumn when we try again.

The Milamber CDO Consortium has had some positive initial news to our EC Funding application.

We have had back our Evaluation Summary from the EC Funding process for the Milamber CDO Project – in summary we scored 12.5 out 15 which is classified as a ‘very good’ score and effectively puts us in the ‘eligible for funding’ score range of between 10.0 and 15.0 points.

However, we still do not know whether we have got (or not) any funding!

That information is still to follow…………all that we are told is that it basically boils down to how heavy the competition is / was, and how many parties the EC have decided to fund in the end.

PERA will be finding out over the next few days ‘when’ we get to know that important piece of news. We will keep you posted!

Summary of Scoring System:

0- The proposal fails to address the criterion under examination or cannot be judged due to missing or incomplete information

1- Poor. The criterion is addressed in an inadequate manner, or there are serious inherent weaknesses.

2- Fair. While the proposal broadly addresses the criterion, there are significant weaknesses.

3- Good. The proposal addresses the criterion well, although improvements would be necessary.

4- Very Good. The proposal addresses the criterion very well, although certain improvements are still possible.

5- Excellent. The proposal successfully addresses all relevant aspects of the criterion in question. Any shortcomings are minor.

The proposal must score the minimum threshold of 10 to be eligible for funding.

Our Scores for each section:

Section 1 – Scientific                     4.0 / 5.0

Section 2 – Management             4.5 / 5.0

Section 3 – Exploitation              4.0 / 5.0

Section 4 – Ethical                         N/A

Total                                                 12.5 / 15.0

For those who like percentages:  83.3%

For those of you following our EC funding proposal we are delighted to announce that the Proposal has been submitted this week to the EC.

In the end we had 11 Partners join in what is being called by the consortium the ‘Milamber CDO’ project these are:

Pearson Education, Redtray Ltd, 2SMS ltd, Lifecycle Software Ltd, Ashridge Business School, PERA via UK Intelligent Systems Research Institute, Universite de Technologie de Compiengne,  Universita degle studi d Uniburb Carlo Bo, Institut NAtional De Recherche En Informatique Et, Foundation for Research and technology – Hellas Institute of Computer Science and of course Milamber Group.

I have to say the amount of intellectual brain power in the individuals and teams being put forward by these organisations to push the state of the art to the next level in digital preservation is extra-ordinary. Having had the privilege to work closely with the various people invovled over the last several months you can see there has been strong interaction and co-operation already between this diverse group of individuals and they have come together extremely well to plan and write the proposal. The sparks of innovation that have been flying around on this significant research project are quite remarkable. So to all those involved, especially those that worked evenings and weekends to help pull together our proposal, thank you.

We now have to keep our fingers crossed and see whether we will be awarded any funding. 

Here is the Milamber CDO logo.