ETPL and Asia News Network to collaborate on media solutions

Could pave way for new tech.

In a release, ETPL (Exploit Technologies Pte Ltd), the technology transfer arm of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), announced that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Asia News Network (ANN) to collaborate on projects and solutions aimed at the media and advertising industries.

Through this arrangement, ETPL and ANN, a network of national daily newspapers published in Asian cities, will look to collaborate via joint development, exchange of technological information, and marketing events. Key areas of collaboration will include: Human language (speech and text) processing, mobile imaging, video processing, and Analytics.

The agreement aims to build a business and technology ecosystem around the media and advertising sectors and to grow more successes along the lines of A*STAR start-up Knorex. Knorex developed iSnap, an augmented reality application that has been implemented across eight major regional newspapers: Thailand’s The Nation, Malaysia’s The Star, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Indonesia’s Jakarta Post and Kompas, Myanmar’s Eleven, Singapore’s The Edge and Hong Kong’s China Daily.

“Media owners and news organisations have expressed the need to more accurately target and profile users, to develop and deliver rich content with more speed and efficiency and to optimise delivery of content – hence our focus on human language processing, mobile imaging, video processing and analytics.”,” said Lee Han Boon, Senior Vice President at ETPL.

“With new business models comes the need for new technologies. ETPL has been working with A*STAR Research Institutes and partner organizations to develop portfolios of enabling technologies to help strengthen the sector’s competitiveness. As A*STAR’s technology transfer arm, we then work with licensees on commercializing the most promising research outcomes and bringing them to the marketplace – much like what we’ve done with Knorex.”

Knorex’s iSnap solution has been helping major regional publications gain reader engagement and tune content. Its smartphone-driven solution enables newspaper readers to scan editorial and advertisements in iSnap-enabled newspapers to get extra content, such as 3-D images, video clips, photo galleries, product catalogues and contest forms, on their devices.

"Not only does this help newspapers better engage their readers, it also allows them to find out real-time what their readers are interested in and tune their content accordingly. iSnap-enabled newspapers have all seen their mobile app downloads and usage jump by over 100 percent in under three months from their respective launches. These newspapers have also generated new sources of revenue that amount to over S$3 million in total to date," said ETPL.