Playence Announces New FP7 Project

Online, September 30, 2011 (Newswire.com) - playence, the leader in contextualized access to multimedia content, today announced that the European Commission has awarded funding to playence for collaborative R+D work in multimedia annotation and search.

The thirty-month project, known as "Task-oriented search and content annotation for media production" (TOSCA-MP), has been granted 3.547.000 million Euros, and aims at developing user-centric content annotation and search tools for professionals in networked media production and archiving (i.e. television, radio, online). The project work will start on October 1st, 2011 with a kick-off meeting in Graz (Austria).

The TOSCA-MP project will leverage playence's leading distributed and multilingual indexing technology, and advance its context-aware semantic search and retrieval tools applying them to large-scale networked and distributed multimedia repositories.

TOSCA-MP represents the first long-term project for which playence has received funding in the European Commission's highly competitive selection process. The execution of the work will involve 10 participants, including higher education institutes and businesses, representing 5 countries. The consortium is composed by:

Joanneum Research Forschungsgeellschaft mbH, Austria. (Coordinator)
playence GmbH, Austria.
RAI - Radio Televisione Italiana, Italy.
Union Europeenne de Radio Television-EBU, Switzerland.
De Vlaamse Radio en Televisieomroeporganisatie NV, Belgium
Deutsche Thomson OHG, Germany.
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der Angewandten Forschung E.V, Germany.
Insititu fuer Rundfunktechnik GmbH, Germany.
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy.
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

"We are extremely proud of this, our first EU-funded project with playence, and to be able to leverage the unique expertise of our highly skilled talent base," said Sinuhe Arroyo, founder and CEO of playence, "The consortium is one of the strongest I have ever seen in this type of projects, and we all look forward to amply meet the project goals and make it a great success."

About the Seventh Framework Programme
FP7 is the short name for the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development. This is the EU's main instrument for funding research in Europe and it will run from 2007 to 2013. The European Commission budget for this seven years period is € 50.5 billion. FP7 supports research in selected priority areas - the aim being to make, or keep, the EU as a world leader in those sectors. FP7 is also designed to respond to Europe's employment needs and competitiveness.

About TOSCA-MP
TOSCA-MP aims to develop user-centric content annotation and search tools for professionals in networked media production and archiving (television, radio, online), addressing their specific use cases and workflow requirements. This will be achieved by scalable and distributed content processing methods performing advanced multimodal information extraction and semantic enrichment. Other key technology areas will include search methods across heterogeneous networked content repositories and novel user interfaces.

About playence
playence is a technology solutions provider to businesses and institutions with operations in the UK, Austria, Spain and the US. The company's offering is a Web-based solution for improving information access to multimedia content across the organization. playence's products have direct application in a wide range of verticals and domains, such as Advertising, Marketing, Media, eCommerce, Finance, Insurance, Telco or Biotechnology.

Contact:
Austria - Headquarters
Tanja Hauser, Marketing and Communications
Phone: +43 6644349808
Email: [email protected]

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including the expected development, performance or rankings of products or services; statements of expectation or belief; and any statement of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. playence assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.