Partnering with Future Media Lab, WAN-IFRA and its Global Alliance for Media Innovation (GAMI), launch a Start-up Park.
Start-up Park is the new exclusive business platform which allows the next generation of tech entrepreneurs and start-ups to meet and engage with the global network of media executives attending the incoming DCX Digital Content Expo (Berlin, 10 to 12 October 2017). The start-up Park will accelerate the dissemination of creative solutions needed to boost the innovation potential of media organisations.
The geography and process of innovation are now more open, collaborative and disperse than ever. Innovation efforts in the news media industry are simultaneously more globalised and more localised while the increasing variety of players contributes to enrich the innovation landscape. But the separate efforts, prototypes and roll-outs by hundreds of different tech companies get inconsistent attention and analysis. Vital lessons and examples are not being widely enough or rapidly enough disseminated.
Advancing innovative technologies to the market
With its Start-up Park, WAN-IFRA’s DCX Digital Content Expo brings those companies together in a central and accessible place: the exhibition is a unique environment for early stage start-ups to engage with a global network of thousands of media executives from around the world. Its goal is to rapidly advance innovative technologies and talents to the market and lead to better economy of scales for news publishers. The new area is designed to promote new ideas of start-ups and connect them with potential customers (media executives) and incubators. Young tech companies (less than 3 years on the market) have the opportunity to exhibit their solutions at attractive special conditions. It combines networking opportunities, series of 30-minutes lectures and pitches. WAN-IFRA will celebrate the best of show in a special start-up contest held during the Expo.
“The success of media companies is to a large extent driven by the collaboration capabilities of all parties involved. We are proud to contribute to this essential collaboration work that unlocks the innovation potential of tech entrepreneurs with outstanding creative solutions but a lack of market access to commercialise them successfully”, says Vincent Peyregne, CEO of WAN-IFRA and founder of GAMI. “WAN-IFRA believes that traditional news publishers need to evolve from a culture that is insular, guarded and top-down in its decision making to one that is collaborative, intellectually curious and data and tech driven. The Start-up Park is one of the initiatives of our Global Alliance for Media Innovation that helps news media organisations to shift their business in a constructive and collaborative way”, adds Peyregne.
“Looking at the wide range of innovations happening today, driven by the smartest and most creative entrepreneurial minds in Europe, we get a feel for the changes Europe’s media sector is going through” says Max von Abendroth, founder of Future Media Lab. “Journalism media faces new challenges in the digital sphere as the audiences move to new channels, it is making its trusted content accessible for a wider range of audiences, and it is exploring new ways of monetizing media content. Start-ups presented in Berlin in October offer forward-looking solutions. The Future Media Lab. is very happy to facilitate a successful matchmaking in the media innovation space.”
From innovative ad-tech tools to new forms of narrative
The Start-up Park will focus on innovations that combine short-term and long-term priorities for news organisations to move into an era dominated by innovative ad-tech tools, new forms of narrative and engagement with the audience like virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, automated generation of content. Furthermore, entrepreneurs will present the next generation of productivity tools powered by machine learning, predictive analytics, and business models for the monetisation of digital content.
PandaSuite, for example, offers a solution to create an app without any coding skills. The start-up provides an online studio for creating all kinds of interactive stories, communication tools, magazines or games. Another start-up represented at the exhibition is Apollo: Based on extensive studies in the field of artificial intelligence, Apollo developed tools that help media companies to automate labour-intensive jobs like PDF segmentation or article clustering. Ownpage uses an algorithm for personalisation: Its software allows news companies to show readers stories based on their reading habits and what other similar users are reading. Additionally, users can build personalized email newsletters.
The start-up Park is a joint initiative by WAN-IFRA’s Global Alliance for Media Innovation (GAMI), and the Future Media Lab that is hosted by EMMA, the European Magazine Association.