National Media Group (NMG) and the Skolkovo Foundation (VEB.RF Group) held the final of the Media Gate Competition of Innovative Projects. The winners will have the opportunity to implement their pilot projects with National Media Group, as well as take part in the FASTTRACK program for free and quickly become Skolkovo residents.
On the demo day, 20 finalists presented their innovative solutions in 4 areas: machine learning and artificial intelligence, infrastructure for media, computer graphics and animation as well as B2C products that can strengthen National Media Group lines of business.
Expert jury originally planned to select Top 10 projects from the list of finalists, but the high quality of represented works resulted in 11 projects making it to the top. The following solutions were recognized as the Top 3 winners with the best chance of launching:
- Rubbles Customer Insight is a system of personal recommendations for more.tv users;
- Swapi is a virtual advertising platform that allows to integrate ads or product placement in real-time videos.
Two more virtual reality projects shared a place in the Top 3, gaining the same number of votes from the jury:
- TDS Virtual production is a solution which allows to implement technologies of mixed reality into production of visual content, raising its quality and allowing to cut budgets in the long-term perspective;
- Drivecast is a solution, which adds virtual advertising to a broadcast without disrupting the established broadcasting process.
The winners will be awarded with free participation in the FASTTRACK program and if they succeed in it, they will become residents of Skolkovo in an accelerated manner.
Another 7 projects were recognised by National Media Group experts as the most promising for cooperation:
- Anti-Piracy allows to track the intellectual property objects placement in real time on electronic resources and automatically sends pre-trial claims to violators;
- WhoisBlogger is an IT company that deals with analytics in Influencer Marketing;
- Neuotrend, Skolkovo resident » – neuromarketing laboratories and studies designed to detect the neurophysiological reactions of respondents during the course of market research to assess the perception of content (stimulus) of a particular type;
- Teleport Media, Skolkovo resident – the largest peer-to-peer content delivery network (CDN) in the Russian Federation for online TV and VOD services that are interested in an inexpensive, efficient and scalable CDN;
- RuGeeks is a last-mile content delivery network (CDN) that supplies its network within the regions with servers from telecommunications and corporate partners;
- ZOOM TV is a recommendation system with a number of its own B2C and B2B services based on it;
- Ferretvideo is a service of interactive advertising video-based creatives - games, quizzes, tests, banners and tags for products intended for videos about advertising, sports, movies, cybersports, etc. (Playable Ads).
Svetlana Balanova, CEO of National Media Group: “Media is moving towards digitalization in leaps and bounds. Technology affects the future of our business. National Media Group produces and distributes content on a national scale, and we are interested in finding new solutions that will help to develop and diversify our business”.
Konstantin Parshin, Vice President, Executive Director of the Information Technology Cluster of the Skolkovo Foundation: “Interaction with National Media Group helped young teams to find an entry point into the media market. A large number of applications in B2C and AI/ML areas confirms the high interest and desire of start-ups to create technological solutions in creative industries. We see a demand for interactive and complementary technologies and plan to hold several more competitions and accelerators within this year and in 2022”.
Alexey Kalenchuk, Director of Media Technologies at the Skolkovo Foundation: “This is the first media technology competition in Skolkovo, and probably the only one within the last five years in Russia. For us Media Gate is a successful start in a new direction. In the 4th quarter of 2021, we will announce another competition with the focus on infrastructure solutions that will help with the production and distribution cycle of audiovisual content throughout”.
In total, 205 teams from 10 countries and over 50 cities took part in the competition. The most popular areas among the participants were B2C products, as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence, which accounted for more than half of the applications.