Stream Global’s philosophy is to focus on early stage companies to help improve their strategies and business model for the long haul, to seize opportunities and increase revenue in the regional markets and to help them to determine the best method to raise funds and to achieve best value for their business.

“We are glad to work hand in hand with MDA to nurture and mentor the new startups,” said Bill Liu, Chairman of Stream Global Pte Ltd. “I am certain that our partners and associate will be able to add tremendous value to the new IDM startups”.

For more information on our i.Jam programme, please visit i.Jam Programme Overview.

We have completed i.MATCH Cycle I and are now beginning i.MATCH Cycle II. Highlights of Cycle I include:

• 20 companies attended the Business Skills Masterclass Workshop on 2-3 June
• 13 companies presented at the first i.MATCH Showcase event on 29 July
• 69 investors have joined the i.MATCH Investor Core Group to date.
• 56 people attended the Showcase Event, including 43 ICG members and 13 other guests
• 19 private meetings were held between investors and companies at the Showcase Event
• ICG investors continue to follow-up with i.MATCH Cycle I companies for Series A investment

The workshop is a free, two-day intensive session to help companies further develop their business plans and investor presentations. All companies that attend the workshop will be considered for presentation at the iMATCH Cycle II Showcase (tentatively scheduled for end October/early November).

For more information, please visit the i.Match website.

RAdm (NS) Lui Tuck Yew, Senior Minister of State for Education and Information, Communications and the Arts, announced the initiative at the i.JAM Networking Session. The initiative is meant to help raise the investment needed by IDM companies to further commercialise and develop their products and their companies.

This is done by putting selected companies through an intensive programme consisting of business planning and presentation classes, business plan improvement meetings, and personal coaching sessions.

These companies will then pitch their products to venture capitalists and other investors who might be interested in their products. On top of the private investments, the companies also qualify for R&D grants from IMDMPO or co-investment by SPRING SEEDS Capital of Spring Singapore.

So far, the initiative has signed up 40 potential investors, including big names like SPH, ST Electronics, Mediacorp Technologies, IDG Ventures Vietnam, and Stream Global.

This initiative is part of IDMPO’s ongoing effort to create an interlocking ecosystem between the four key groups in IDM R&D, which are institutes of higher learning, industry players, start-ups and individuals, and schools, to create innovation and capacity in the IDM industry.

Source: Business Times Online

Other i.MATCH related news

MDA launches iMATCH to bridge funding gap for IDM startups (Channel News Asia)
IDM start-ups to get boost from i.MATCH initiative (Business Times)
MATCH to boost local IDM companies’ search for funding (Berita Harian)
IDM start-ups to get boost from i.MATCH initiative (Business Times Online)
MDA help for digital media startups (The New Paper)
MDA sets digital fund, new niche TV (The Hollywood Reporter)
Singapore govt to support interactive digital media startups (IndiaTelevision.com)

• iMATCH
• Upcoming international events
• BCA
• iDIOTS- NUS Industrial Design Graduation Show 2008
• NRF Research Fellowship

iJAM networking session announcing the launch of iMATCH

An initiative by Interactive Digital Media R&D Programme Office (IDMPO) and SPRING Singapore, the i.MATCH programme aims to provide a conducive platform for both investors and companies ready for further investments to meet and explore. Details will be announced on 30th July 2008 during our i.JAM networking event.

RADM (NS) Lui Tuck Yew, Senior Minister Of State For Education And Information, Communications And The Arts will be the guest of honour.

Also the highlights for the afternoon are various industry announcements as global platform players such as HP and Apple will be announcing a collaborative effort to potentially help provide opportunities for IDM companies reach out to global audiences.

Attendees can also engage in a discussion with our panel comprising of representatives from various corporate industry players or investing firms. Among the panel would be Ms. Lauren Liang from GE Commercial Finance, Mr. Pierre Hennes from Upstream Global and Mr. Eric Chan from ST Electronics. They will be discussing a topic close to eery start up’s heart- “What do investors look for?”.

Two new call for proposals will also be announced at the event. Do join us for an exciting afternoon!

Venue: Swissôtel Merchant Court Ballroom
Date & time: 30th July 2008 1500-2000hrs

For more information, please visit http://www.idm.sg/?page_id=76

Upcoming international events

This year is going to be an exciting year as ISEA, the International Symposium on Electronic Art and the inaugural ACM SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics will be coming to Singapore.

ISEA will be happening from 25th July to 3rd August 2008 while SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 will take place from 10th to 13th December 2008. Highly acclaimed artists, researchers and industry players will be attending the events. Do visit our events page on http://www.idm.sg/events/ for updates on more events.

For more information, please visit the 2 events, please visit http://www.isea2008singapore.org/ and http://www.siggraph.org/asia2008/.

Broadcast Asia 2008

Broadcast Asia 2008 was held on the 17th to 20th June 2008 at Singapore Expo Hall 8. It was a good chance for exhibiting companies from all over the world, including Singapore, to showcase their innovations and technology to invited trade guests and visitors.

The Broadcast Asia 2008 International Conference was also held in conjunction with Broadcast Asia, along with various other conferences spread out over the 4-day event.

13 companies marveled visitors with their projects at the IDM showcase within the Singapore Pavilion. Seven core exhibitors put up an integrated showcase, with MXR Corporation, Interactive Multimedia Lab (IML) of National University of Singapore, QMax Communications, G Element, ServTouch Eti, PGK Media. Oghma Pte Ltd and XiD Technologies collaborating with each other and leveraging on their existing technologies. Other companies and start ups such as Widgeo.us, Zepth, Versonic, Motion Elements, Visual Factory and Crystal Computer Graphics showcased their individual projects.

iDIOTS- NUS Industrial Design Graduation Show 2008

The National University of Singapore Industrial Design Graduation Show was held on 30 May to 1 June 2008. The event was organized at The Central, with RADM (NS) Lui Tuck Yew, Senior Minister of State for Education and Information, Communications and The Arts as the guest of honour.

One can imagine how lives could be transformed when the numerous projects turn from prototypes to common daily life tools. The projects showcased were classic examples of technological innovation, human interface and ambience integration.

Chen Meihua’s project, memo, is sparked off partly due to her personal interests in people and relationships. This project had also provided her an opportunity to develop a product that is centered on the latent desire of users to build richer memories with family and friends. For her project, she designed a device capable of dual view, to simultaneously catch the subject and the background. She hoped to bridge the gap between the traditional notion of cameras and how cameras were being perceived.

Echopod by Joanne Lin is an audio device which will bring groups of people closer to nature and nature guides. Based on bone conduction and Bluetooth technology, the earpieces work to facilitate and enhance the whole experience of nature tours.

Projects serve to provide students with a broad range of design exercises to learn about scale, human interface, technological innovations, ambience, culture and identity, environmental concerns and sustainability. It adopts a holistic approach in design education that is both humanistic as well as market orientated.
id’s in the idea. Run over to http://www.nusindustrialdesign.com/ to catch come id.

Invitation to NRF Research Fellowship

The Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF) invites brilliant, young researchers who are ready for their first independent research appointments to apply for the prestigious NRF Research Fellowship Awards.
The NRF Research Fellowship (RF) Scheme is a globally competitive programme to attract, recruit and root young scientists and researchers to conduct independent research in Singapore. It will provide attractive funding to brilliant, young scientists to carry out independent, cutting edge research in Singapore. Appointees could be offered concurrent faculty positions at local universities.

Application is to be submitted online at the following web-link before 30 September 2008:

https://rita.nrf.gov.sg/AboutUs/NRF_Initiatives/NRF_RF_2008/default.aspx

Shortlisted candidates will be invited to Singapore to present their research work, meet local researchers and identify potential collaborators and host research organisations. Final selection for the awards will be made by the NRF Scientific Advisory Board co-chaired by Dr Curtis Carlson (President & CEO of SRI International) and Prof. Ulrich Suter (Professor of Polymer Materials, ETH Zurich).

Apply now if you have a PhD degree from a reputable university and work at the forefront of research in your field.

• IDMPO at BroadcastAsia 2008
• Gaming Gets Serious
• Gimme a ”C”, ”I”, ”D” and ”M”
• Sound Research in NTU
• Hear That?

IDM at Broadcast Asia 2008

As Asia’s premier digital multimedia technology event, BroadcastAsia will feature a wide range of companies, e.g. broadcasters, production companies, animation houses, content owners, computer graphic producers, online gaming developers. BroadcastAsia2008 “Digital: The Journey Forward” will showcase the latest digital multimedia technology and professional industry equipment and services from exhibiting companies all over the world.

A core focus of the Singapore Pavilion this year is on interactive digital media, and IDM Programme Office (IDMPO) will be having a showcase area within the Media Development Authority Jewel Showcase under the Singapore Pavilion.

The showcase will be featuring some of the projects funded by IDMPO for the past year, and their outcomes thus far. The technologies include 3D rendering, content delivery, and visualization and effects, etc.

The exhibition will be held from 17-20 June 2008 at Singapore Expo. Do come down and catch the exciting showcase by IDMPO and MDA!

For more information, please visit http://www.broadcast-asia.com/

Gaming Gets Serious

Participants at the recent Computer Games, Multimedia & Allied Technology 2008 discussed new IDM innovations, impact on users and future developments.

The theme was gaming, but the discussions were serious at the Computer Games, Multimedia & Allied Technology 2008 (CGAT 2008) conference on 28 April. CGAT concentrated less on the games themselves than on harnessing the available Interactive Digital Media (IDM) to make the games happen.

Instead of testing Grand Theft Auto IV, participants were busy discussing not only games and gaming technology, but also issues like the impact of IDM on users. Blackberries and cell phones are wonderful tools of communication, observed Associate Professor Harold Thwaites, but he asked if they have spawned an “always in contact work ethic”, and a “vacation-connection addiction”.

Another issue, of particular interest to developers of computer games, is the possibility that virtual reality may not need to be 100 percent to promote a “sense of reality”, as shown by the attachment of people to their Tamagotchi virtual pets.

This is exactly of interest to IDMPO, highlighted in the keynote address of Mr. Michael Yap, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, MDA and Executive Director of the Interactive Digital Media (IDM) Programme Office.

Cyberspace, Mr. Yap proposed, is about to go through another evolution where our physical world and the virtual world will merge, or at least the boundaries between the cyber and physical spaces will blur.

This technological revolution is called Co-Space, short for Co-existent Spaces. Users will be able to process information seamlessly across both environments. Physical spaces, fitted out with ubiquitous computing and smart interfaces, will be infused with dynamic, rich media interactivity, so a person could look for all his friends in certain vicinity, for example. With actual spaces co-existing with real-time virtual environments, digital interaction will shift from web “pages” to web “places”.

Mr. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Minister of Finance, also noted that computer games are “not just fun but a huge site for innovation.” Games, he said, “are providing a scaleable environment in which we are able to experiment and test convergent technology”.

Mixing and matching C”, I”, D” and M”

Singapore’s network of IDM Research-Oriented Centres of Excellence is growing. We have IDMI, iMC, IDMC and now IMI.

IMI is the Institute for Media Innovation, launched on 30 Apr 08, by the Nanyang Technological University. IMI will bring together 100 researchers from a range of disciplines, including art and design, engineering and education, focusing on areas such as next-generation multimedia search, advanced “intelligence” in media, as well as innovative digital cinema and television.

One of the professors in the National University of Singapore (NUS) has commented on the increased interaction and dialogue between different disciplines, which is a good development. He himself is involved in IDMI’s work. Now, IDMI stands for the Interactive Digital Media Institute, launched by NUS last year.

There is also iMC, which is Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s iMedia Centre, and IDMC, which could be Singapore Polytechnic’s Interactive and Digital Media Centre or Temasek Polytechnic’s Interactive Digital Media Collaboratory.

The excitement in our Institutes of Higher Learning is palpable and we look forward to good IDM R&D coming from them.

Sound Research

When sound is shaped and packed into a tight beam, it can be projected to a targeted group of audience, creating interesting sound effects. This has various applications such as in billboards, gaming and multilingual teleconferencing, where sound beams of different languages can be projected to different groups of participants in the same room without the need of physical partitioning.

There are however several research challenges to overcome. The first is the enhancement of audio fidelity of the directional sound beam, which is currently limited to speech quality due to the very narrow bandwidth of the physical ultrasonic emitters. Another challenge is to devise ways to control and adjust the sound beam so that more precise control features can be achieved.

Dr Gan Woon Seng from the Nanyang Technological University is now leading a team to work on these challenges in his research project “Next Generation of Directional Sound Beam with Bass Enhancement and Beamsteering to Support New Interactive Digital Media Applications.” For his earlier work in this area, Dr Gan had won the IES Prestigious Engineering Achievement Award in 2001. He also has 10 journal publications as well as 3 local and 1 US patents pending.

This research project is one of the R&D projects in the area of Interactive Digital Media that have been accepted for funding. To date, 26 projects from our Institutes of Higher Learning have been awarded.

He plans to revolutionise the way we hear by creating a new type of mixer console – a visual audio mixer.

Mr. Jim Miller came to Singapore in 2005 to pursue an executive master of business administration, but the programme led to bigger things.

On the advice of his classmate, he started a company that creates software to enhance real-time audio for mixer consoles, in 2007.

Supported by the i.JAM (IDM Jump-start and Mentor) Microfunding Scheme, Versonic Pte Ltd is creating the first visual audio mixer for live shows.

“The visual audio mixer is a concept whereby the sound sources are presented in an intuitive graphical manner. Imagine being able to manipulate the sounds as they appear onstage. A guitar source would look like a guitar, a piano a piano, and so on,” said Mr. Miller.

He was inspired to design something that caters to the needs of the consumer market where according to him, has no quality digital mixers available.

He had previously worked with an engineering team at Euphonix, a US-based company. Its System 5 digital audio mixing console is used by Hollywood movie production companies, television studios and live venues such as the Sydney Opera House.

Though useful for complex audio productions, the product is expensive, Mr. Miller said. So, over the last 10 months, Versonic’s board of five directors has been working on developing its software which he expects to be priced “in the low thousands (US$)”.

The team is considering these ways to bring the yet-to-be-named software to market: Selling just the software, and/or offering it together with hardware.

In the first option, users will have to install the software in their own computers. They will also need to buy additional audio converters to get audio into and out of their computers. Most computers can handle only up to two microphones and up to six speaker outputs.

The second option costs more but enables users to plug in and start mixing audio right away.

“I hope that one day all the schools, live music venues and places of worship use our product,” he said.

While these potential clients might already have their own audio mixers, Mr. Miller is confident that Versonic’s software will gain a foothold in the market.

“There will always be some number of churches that start up each year. And when an established church remodels, it often updates its audio equipment at the same time,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Versonic team is keeping busy with business development, building distribution partnerships and raising funds. The goal is to launch the software next year.

“Frankly speaking, i.JAM and programmes like it are why this company is based in Singapore and not the US. I feel there is a real push to grow businesses locally with a global focus and that is exactly what we are trying to do,” Mr. Miller said.

The i.JAM Microfunding Scheme, launched in 2006, supports people and start-ups with breakthrough ideas that can be development into innovative products and services.

View the full press release (PDF)