Good Showing by IDMPO-funded companies at Emerging Enterprise 2010 Awards 

Two IDMPO-funded companies were recognized at the recently-concluded Emerging Enterprise 2010 Awards. Multimedia surveillance and intelligence company KAI Square won top honours as one of the three winners, while gaming company Tyler Projects emerged as one of the 15 finalists. The Emerging Enterprise Awards is one of the key annual entrepreneurial awards that seek out emerging enterprises with revenue of less that $10 million per year. OCBC’s enterprise banking head of emerging business Tan Chor Sen, who was on the judging panel, said that on top of being able to deliver outstanding financial results amid poor lacklustre economic conditions, the three firms stood out for having the foresight to grow their business overseas, and expand their innovation and productivity capabilities. Kai Square won $390,000 in the form of an $150,000 interest-free loan, educational and development grants, business consulting services, and brand and product development research services. 

Solving real-world problems the 3-D way 

In June, the Centre for Advanced Media Technology at the Nanyang Technological University received a boost of $14 million from the MDA, NTU and German research organisation Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft – in a bid to transfer R&D to the market here. This marks the first time Europe’s largest institution for applied research has opened a facility in Asia. As a result of the new funders, NTU’s centre has also been renamed Fraunhofer Project Centre for Interactive Digital Media. Fraunhofer IDM@NTU’s co-director said that they are looking at real-world problems and trying to help solve them with their enabling technologies such as 3-D visualisations as well as virtual and augmented reality. Moreover, the team is also working towards using such visualization techniques to involve visitors in Singapore attractions. IDM Programme Office executive director Michael Yap said that the centre will help enhance the international network of world-class research in Singapore. 

Razer in the News 

Razer, the world’s leading gaming hardware brand, has had a busy past six months. During CES 2010 early in the year, the company was featured in various media, including Tom’s Guide, CNBC, and Fox Business for its IDMPO-funded project TruMotion. This partnership between Razer and Sixense—which has produced the TruMotion motion-sensing game controller—won CNET’s best of CES (Finalist) award, as well as CruchGear’s Best of CES award. In April, Razer announced its global strategic alliance with Shanda and Kylin to work on the game Genghis Khan II. Razer will be providing all user-interface and hardware support for the game, including imparting an Asian flavour to the UI. Just one month later, the PC Gaming Alliance announced that Razer’s Min-Liang Tan, Chief Executive Officer, had joined their Board as director. More accolades are sure to come the way of Razer judging by its impressive performance these last few months. Well done, Razer! 

Above Technology Partners with Microsoft to Launch TangoFX 

ABOVE Technology announced Singapore’s first interactive media application on the Windows Phone 7 platform.  TangoFX is a context aware interactive service that provides live and on-demand cinematic experiences for viewers to watch their favourite content anywhere, anytime and on any screen. Through the Microsoft BizSpark program, ABOVE worked closely with Microsoft to develop TangoFX and create a world-class media application for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 platform.  TangoFX is also the industry’s first open standards-based real-time collaborative interactive media platform. The software platform runs an advanced user interface and video applications in a limited memory footprint, allowing optimal implementation on a variety of network and devices. Using smart on-screen widgets, the interactive service enhances the cinematic experience by allowing viewers to connect with friends & family, and pick, share and discuss scenes of mutual interest while watching live or on-demand content. 

Above Technologies demonstrating the TangoFX application at Broadcast Asia 2010

Research to Market (R2M) Seminar Series: Technologies for Next Generation Media Search 

With increasing integration of computing, broadcasting, networking and the internet, multimedia information has become pervasive and permeates almost every aspect of our lives. Increasingly, we find information coming in different media forms, multiple external sources and encoded in various knowledge representations. Typical media types include text, image, video and audio. Major parallel sources of information may come from the Web, and social network sites such as Wikipedia. To process such information effectively and efficiently, the ability to analyse and fuse the myriads of related sources of information has become critically important.

 NUS researchers from the School of Computing are pioneering a new generation of media search technologies, spanning from web-scale image/video search to multilingual search, scanned text search and speech-based search.

Join the NUS researchers on August 12th 2010, in a seminar on Technologies for Next Generation Media Search, to learn about some of their cutting-edge research in media search technologies, including interactive web-scale media search, mobile music retrieval and its applications, machine translation and multilingual search, and management of surveillance data. Registration is free and all are welcome. For more details and to register, please click here. Contact iloas@nus.edu.sg for more information.

From left: Prof.Chua Tat Seng, Dr.Wang Ye, A/Prof. Ng Hwee Tou, Dr. Sim Khe Chai, Prof. Tan Chew Lim, Prof. Mohan Kankanhalli. The Media Search seminar will cover research undertaken by professors listed above .