Worldline [Euronext: WLN] is the European leader in the payments and transactional services industry. Worldline delivers new-generation services, enabling its customers to offer smooth and innovative solutions to the end consumer.
Key actor for B2B2C industries, with over 40 years of experience, Worldline supports and contributes to the success of all businesses and administrative services in a perpetually evolving market. Worldline offers a unique and flexible business model built around a global and growing portfolio, thus enabling end-to-end support. Worldline activities are organized around three axes: Merchant Services & Terminals, Mobility & e-Transactional Services, Financial Processing & Software Licensing including equensWorldline. Worldline employs more than 8,600 people worldwide, with estimated revenue of circa 1.5 billion euros on a yearly basis. Worldline is an Atos company. Web: worldline.com

Founded in 1987, ATC is an Information Technology Company (SME) offering solutions and services in specific business sectors, including Media, Banking and Retail, Utilities and the Public Sector. Our solutions are developed on technologies for Content Management, Enterprise Software, Web Applications, Human Capital Resource Management, e-Learning, and Mobile Applications.

Of the primary commercial activities for ATC is the development of products and services for the media market, in which we have managed to penetrate in several EU countries, the Eastern Europe and the CIS countries, as well as the Balkans. NewsAsset, an end-to-end multimedia cross-channel solution for news agencies, broadcasters and pu lishe s, is the leadi g edge of the o pa s su ess sto offe i g commercial contracts both inside and outside Greece. Indicative major clients are the national news agencies of Greece, Portugal, Poland, Russia and Tunisia, along with many publishers in several EU countries. In addition, ATC is offering TruthNest, a service for assessing the trustworthiness of news information found in Social Media. Furthermore, ATC, in collaboration with Deutsche Welle, is funded by Google under the Digital News Initiative, to prepare Verify.Media, a complete suite of digital tools for collaborative curation and verification of news content.

The ATC Innovation Lab shows more than 25 years of expertise in research and innovation. Our objective is to turn promising ideas into concrete and robust products for the sectors of commercial interest to ATC. Through intense and continuous involvement in cutting-edge research and innovation projects, we aim to develop the next generation of commercial targets, exploiting state-of-the- art technologies for web service and mobile application development, big data management and cloud- based service engineering. Being a technology partner, iLab has developed skills in modern software engineering techniques, like Agile prototyping, DevOps and Model Driven Engineering, while we have successfully applied tools and methodologies for continuous integration, such as Maven, Hudson, Sonar and Junit, in the integration of medium and large scale innovation projects.

ATC, is a partner in the NESSI ETP (www.nessi-europe.com) and a full member in the Big Data Value Association (www.bdva.eu).

Antenna is a free-to-air national television and radio broadcaster, with comprehensive news bulletin production, scripted and non-scripted series production, sports events transmission production and web portal with news and VOD services.

Founded in 1993 and has been holding one of the leading places in viewers ratings ever since. Antenna has been sensitive to social changes, adjusting to them and opening new ways to TV news and entertainment.

It constantly fulfils viewers needs by offering original television programs of the highest standards. Having entered the digital era, the channel is now supplied with the most sophisticated technological means.

Its requisite technological substructure, staff expertise, know-how and successful realization of great projects make Antenna one of the most reliable providers of high quality services and content in Cyprus.

Web: www.ant1iwo.com

BMAT was a spin off from the Music Technology Group at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona in 2005. The researchers’ aim and motto was “to make the music industry a better place”. The company launched a portfolio of music recommendation, singing evaluation and music monitoring products to track any public communication of music. Further feedback from the market and business strategy planning led BMAT to change course into a Software-as-a-Service enterprise.

Since then the company has grown to service 80 Collective Management Organizations and 600 Record labels and publishers. Today our monitoring platform delivers 26 million identifications monthly and overviews 1 trillion digital transactions yearly.

Traditionally specialising in radio and TV music usage monitoring, BMAT has diversified over the years, developing new features catering to the needs of its clients. BMAT is now considered the world leader in music monitoring for performing rights organisations. It services more than 35 countries of the five continents.

More recently, BMAT has won tenders for cutting edge big data and music monitoring projects including a partnership with the International Confederation of Authors and Composers Socieities for the increased data enrichment of music monitoring reports and another partnership with Armonia for the processing of music usage reports generated by online music services such as YouTube, Spotify and Deezer.

Software & Datasets

• The music recommendation engine, Ella, was launched in 2007 for providing music recommendation services to companies such as Samsung, Yamaha and SynchTank.
• The singing evaluation software, Skore, launched in 2008 and was included in the TV series “The Voi e i o e tha ou t ies o ld ide f o the U“ to B azil. It p o ides lie ts such as NBC, the BBC, TeleCinco or Talpa the chance to perform first round-auditions with real-time a d o li e e aluatio s f o the si ge s o pute .
• The music monitoring service, Vericast, was also launched and is the core software behind BMAT’s business. The latest feature to be added to Vericast is the monitoring of music played in advertisements. Though Vericast is the dominant service, each of them relies on a company-managed database of 25 million tracks sourced from record labels, digital distributors and the performing rights organisations themselves.
• PRONTO is the name of the BMAT service for Collective Management Organisations to process music Digital Sales Reports. It offers improved efficiency and transparency all along the chain, from the reception of the reports to the invoicing. PRONTO is designed to excel in scalability, matching, and speed of processing, and allows any copyright owner to track the compensation chain over a multi- functional interactive dashboard.

Web: BMAT

Founded in 1953, Deutsche Welle is Germanies international broadcaster. According to its statutory mission, Deutsche Welle promotes the understanding of Germany as an independent nation with its roots in European culture, and as a liberal, democratic, constitutional state based on the rule of law. It is also meant to provide a forum in Europe and on other continents to German and other points of view on important issues, with the aim of fostering understanding and exchange between cultures and people. In addition, DW contributes to promoting the German language.

DW fulfills this mission with a full range of television, radio and online services. DW is known for its in- depth, reliable news and information in 30 languages – in Arabic and Kiswahili, Indonesian and Urdu, Russian and Spanish, German and English. Culture, education and Europe; those are some of our focal points. We classify facts, explain contexts and analyze background information.

It also runs the DW-AKADEMIE, an institute in which current and emerging media professionals from developing and transitional countries are trained and can enhance existing skills. DW today offers multiplatform services to its worldwide audiences.

In addition to supplying “traditional” platforms / channels such as radio, TV and online, DW has fully embraced new opportunities offered by digitisation. This means targeting new platforms and devices (e.g. mobile phones, IPTV platforms), spreading content via new distribution means (most of them IP-based) and partnering with new and emerging third party platforms (e.g. Social Media portals such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) to increase reach and effectiveness as a publicly funded media company.

Since the late 1990s DW has participated in more than 20 nationally and internationally funded R&D projects. DW will make sure that experiences gained in past and ongoing projects will be fed into the Bloomen work, and that synergies between other projects, covered topics and personnel will be used to the best advantage of all involved. Web: Deutsche Welle

Kendraio is an international media, technology, academic and industry alliance. The mission is to foster an open distributed marketplace for digital media (including films, music, images, games and text).

The initiative researches, recommends and develops enhancements to the digital media marketplace that facilitate interoperability between and revenue generation for content owners and service providers; to enable consumers to use any device or application to browse, search and purchase content from any content catalogue, seamlessly.

Its goals are to:

• Simplify and streamline buying and selling digital content by driving industry adoption of open protocols.
• Enable interoperability between service providers, media applications and devices – every link in the content value chain.
• Build a system where consumers can use any device or application to browse, search and purchase from the globally distributed collection of content catalogues.
• Create a more pleasurable buying experience for consumers and increase reach and revenue for content owners.

Kendraio, is a non-profit company limited by guarentee (company number: 4643358)

• To provide an organisational, legal and infrastructure framework for Kendra Initiative.
• To ensure that Kendra Initiative trials continue to exist beyond the participation of interested
  organisations and individual volunteers.
• To enable the contributions of intellectual property and funds on a sound basis.
• To provide a vehicle for limiting legal exposure while participating in the trials and contributing to software projects.
• To assist with the coordination of marketing efforts, meetings and conferences.
• To provide hosting for Kendra Initiative’s website; and to develop web/email tools to facilitate the collaborative design process, between Kendra Initiative Participants, necessary to create the Kendra System.

For many years Kendraio has been working on harmonising workflow in the media industry. Kendra has been good at industry engagement (with 2000 plus members) and gathering momentum for more open workflows and protocols in the media and music industry. Hence, Kendraio will continue this role in Bloomen, namely industry engagement and developing systems to demonstrate interoperability between different applications and service providers.

Kendraio participates in a number of cross-sector media initiatives and hence has access to a wide scope of stakeholders. Kendraio will continue to model better copyright management techniques within Bloomen – namely based on interoperable modalities.

Web: Kendraio

ICCS/NTUA
(Institute of Communications and Computer Systems/ National Technical University of Athens)

NTUA is the oldest and most prestigious technical university in Greece. It was founded in 1837 and has since been contributing to the progress of the engineering science in Greece. The University comprises nine departments, each one covering a different aspect of the engineering field. The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) of the National Technical University of Athens is well known in Greece and abroad for the research achievements of its faculty members and the good reputation of its students and alumni. The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) is a research organisation associated with the School of ECE and has about 40 laboratories and research units presently active which are established by the implementation of several structural programmes. The Distributed, Knowledge and Media Systems Group (DKMS), is research laboratory operating under ICCS, conducting research in:

• Advanced Distributed Computing, dealing with topics such as Service Oriented Architectures, Cloud Computing and Internet of Things. Related Projects which our group has led or participated: CoherentPaaS, 4CaaSt, COSMOS, Optimis +Spaces, Ponte, IRMOS (FP7), CHALLENGERS (FP6) etc and involved: BEinGRID (FP6), NextGRID (FP6), Akogrimo (FP6), GRIA (FP5), GridLAB (FP5), etc.
• Knowledge, Media & Digital Art, dealing with topics such as Social Analytics, Knowledge Representation and Domain Modelling, Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems. Related Projects which our group has led or participated: SocIoS (FP7), RADICAL (PSP), OpenScienceLink (PSP), ANSWER (FP7), SCOVIS (FP7), POLYMNIA (FP6), FIDIS (FP6), ITACITUS (FP6), etc.