Milamber Blog

(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

REDTRAY hosted for their top clients an ‘Inspiration Day’ at the Park Plaza Hotel, in London, on the 11th May 2010. www.redtray.co.uk  

It was a great honour that they very kindly invited me to speak at the event on the subject of ‘The Power of Media in Business Education’, other speakers included Robin Ryde on his current pet subject, ‘Thought Leadership – Moving Hearts and Minds’.

See previous Milamber Blog on Robin Ryde: http://www.milamberblog.com/robin-ryde-modern-leadership/

For the last few years apart from talking to staff or doing publicity for the company I have been doing a limited amount of public speaking, and I have to say it is thoroughly enjoyable to be doing it again.

Firstly, there is that element of nervousness because some one has trusted you enough to give you a platform to talk about something and the main objective is not to mess it up and make them happy that they did put their trust in you. Then when you do get in front of an audience and start talking you start to get that buzz – especially when you have a free rein to talk about topics that you are passionate about. Personally, I find it is great fun engaging with an audience, making them laugh (with luck), and hopefully giving people some useful insights, so that they  will remember them and hopefully use them in their day to day working lives. And if you do a good job you get some positive and appreciative feedback which is itself rewarding.

Jon Butress, the Marketing Director of Redtray, kindly sent this note after the event, “Thank you for speaking at the REDTRAY Inspirations Day event yesterday.  The feedback from yesterday has been excellent with everyone regarding the day as successful and informative.  Your presentation on Digital Media contributed significantly to the day and we have had many informal comments praising how valuable they found your session.”

Job done.

Project 1: Update 21st Jan 2010 – Significant progress has been made on the EC funding project since the start of the year.

Pearson Education (www.pearson.com) and ourselves have been scoping in detail their contribution to the Project. This is being crystallised into a Project Framework so that we all know which party will contribute what to the overall Project.     

PIXELearning (www.pixelearning.com) have agreed to be a part of the consortium and will contribute Serious Games Simulations to the Project in particular we are looking at creating a suite of learning modules focused around their Role Play Engine. This is a sophisticated piece of technology that was originally created for Comcast in the USA, to help train their 19,000 call centre agents. The technology will be modified so we can simulate conversation scenarios and immerse the learner in an environment where they must navigate through the conversation to learn how best to handle certain outcomes.

Redtray Limited (www.redtray.com) have agreed to be part of the consortium and contribute e-learning and development expertise to the Project via their UK and India based staff & programmers. The details of their contribution are being scoped with the team at Redtray and ourselves. This week we have been understanding Redtray’s  ALTO platform = Learning, Knowledge & Competency Management System, with Resource Planning & Scheduling capabilities.

2SMS (www.2sms.com) have agreed to be a part of the consortium and contribute technology and solutions to the mobile delivery platform of the Project.  

We are currently scheduling the next meetings with PERA (www.pera.com) and Ashridge Business School (www.ashridge.org.uk) as they are kindly letting us use the magnificant Ashridge facilities to facilitate project meetings between the Industrial Partners.