Find a partner

Media organisation(s)/professional(s) involved:  TV Bratislava  (SK)

Idea: We broadcast the news on our television every day at 6 p.m. This activity is that the moderator/ TV presenter reads news from the local environment. One of them is me. This activity could be carried out through a virtual person- programmed.

Keywords: TV, broadcast, AI

Looking for: Thanks to the project, we would programme a moderator on the AI base to read the news once a week. In pilot mode, he would alternate with live colleagues. The aim would be to create such a personality in the first step, to teach it to read messages in Slovak and subsequently in other or other languages.  

Media organisation(s)/professional(s) involved: Varia UG (DE)

Idea: We are Varia, a software startup out of Munich, specializing in natural language processing (NLP). After the first steps & successes with an API based product, we are currently building a new product: Varia Research. Varia Research is a journalistic research tool that is aiming to support journalists and newsrooms in the research process. Our product is to be sold in both B2C and B2B variants. Currently, we focus on the B2C variant, as this is the easier way to market and as the B2B product is a more mature version, involving a heavier development load. While we already have active testers on our B2C product – and plan to launch later this year, we have still a lot of market research to do when it comes to the B2B product (Enterprise version). Hence, we would love to partner & test variants of a Varia Research Enterprise product with media partners under the umbrella of Stars4Media!

Keywords: NLP, API, research

Looking for: As of our current research, the existing Varia Research B2C product would have to be extended in regards of: Team Access, Data Security, File Sharing, On-Premise hosting. These areas are to be prioritized and better defined, which is something that can only properly be done together with a news media company (user), which would have the added benefit to being able to influence the product development to some extent.

Media organisation(s)/professional(s) involved: Lupiga (HR)

Idea: Lupiga is a non-profit online media outlet established in 2001, focusing on human rights, culture and media literacy. It has an audience and associates in the Western Balkans region. Lupiga has a Facebook group with over 60 thousand members. Lupiga is supported through small scale media projects for non-profit media funded primarily by the Fond for Media Pluralism. Lupiga has long-standing plans of starting a weekly community newsletter aimed at boosting articles published on the online portal and foster a tight community of supporters/donors. It is envisioned several authors would take place in editing one issue of the weekly newsletter. Community newsletter will give its readers a unique experience: an op-ed by the weekly author, exclusive content, interactions with readers (choosing topics for coverage, participation in article production, etc.). The community newsletter is not motivated by an effort to monetize our content but to build a close community of supporters/donors which Lupiga can depend on in any future crowdfunding actions.

Keywords: Human rights, culture, weekly community newsletter

Looking for: While there a clear vision of all three newsletters and a broad idea of the content they will offer, Lupiga lacks all other capacities and expert knowledge needed – from technical solutions, tools and software to digital marketing and monetization of newsletters.

Media organisation(s)/professional(s) involved: Tristan Barber (freelance, BE)

Idea: The investigative piece would be a longer segment of the show which covers one topic in-depth and which has been thoroughly researched. The main idea behind this piece is to ensure we highlight a topic that we consider important but which may not be getting enough coverage, or which appears too technical to be interesting. The piece would also include a suggestion for how to fix/change the issue we see. By making it humourous and more playful than traditional news, we aim to make it accessible and interesting, in particular to those who may not already be highly aware of EU-related issues. To summarize, the monologue and investigative pieces would cover actual news: the monologue would provide a humourous recap of things that are happening, while the investigative piece would bring in new research and suggest a solution to rectify the problem. On the other hand, the sketches and news desk would be more satirical pieces that can provide cynicism at times, or could just be for fun, to lighten up the mood. 

Keywords: Show, non-traditional news

Looking for:

Media organisation(s)/professional(s) involved: El HuffPost (ES) 

Idea: Knowing the future reader is the first step of The HuffPost to create a research pole that

collects all the necessary data and explores the possibilities offered by technology to carry out three projects: a) the development of a real-time fact-checking tool; b) the creation of a personalized journalistic product based on reading history and c) the production of a multimedia report in motion and with Augmented Reality as the main support. With ‘Knowing the future reader’, El HuffPost wants to create a research team with which it pursues several objectives: a) formulate questions about technological solutions for journalism with the reader at the centre of everything; b) make the fruit of their research available to other newsrooms to help guide other research and innovation proposals and c) shape three journalistic-technological solutions that have to do, in this order, with data verification and the fight against misinformation; with privacy, data analysis and personalization and with the application of new technologies to journalistic narratives.

Keywords: Technological solutions on journalism

Looking for:

Media organisation(s)/professional(s) involved: Left (IT)

Idea: We aim to create a monitoring system, a database and a series of conceptual graphic maps that will allow users to understand how some conspiracy theories, related to the Sars-Cov2 virus, spread in the countries covered by the investigation. Using different data journalism tools, we will attempt to calculate the impact of such theories on society and their material consequences.

Keywords: Conspiracy theories, data journalism, creating conceptual maps

Looking for:

Media organisation(s)/professional(s) involved: Design AI GmbH (DE)

Idea: We offer a human-in-the-loop video mining platform called Videre AI (www.videre-ai.de), which enables media companies to analyze their videos and tag them with relevant annotations. Our state-of-the-art AI combines visual information, for example, objects or movements, with audio information like speech, to understand the actual context of videos on a radically new level.

Keywords:  Video data, AI

Looking for: Broadcasters, (e.g. News and Sports), advertisement firms, or any company that is dealing with masses of video data.

Media organisation(s)/professional(s) involved: Anchorpoint Software GmbH (DE)

Idea: Anchorpoint is designed to enable media production companies to produce more cost-effectively and efficiently by reducing organizational overhead. Anchorpoint provides an all-in-one platform for version control, task management and feedback. Tasks such as documentation can be greatly simplified through an intuitive UX.

Keywords: collaboration, internal process, optimization

Looking for: We are looking for media production companies that want to use Anchorpoint in their everyday production to simplify their workflows. Since the core functionality of the product is already implemented, we want to find out how well it works for media production companies in everyday production and where improvements are still needed.

Media organisation(s)/professional(s) involved: China Files (IT)

Idea: About 25% of non-EU immigrants come from Asia, in particular from China, India and Bangladesh. Nonetheless, other nationalities have come to Europe during the XX century. The last one hundred years have marked a period of huge migration flows, economic and political ups-and-downs: how is this story told – or untold – now that most countries in Asia are facing a deep transformation and becoming the new protagonists of globalization? The aim is to recover these stories through memories, documents, photographs and videos in order to create a series of products documenting the big and the small, personal, history of diasporas from Asia to the European Union. Eventually, this work may be materialized in an interactive, responsive AI persona that will tell his/her story through the questions of users/visitor

Keywords: storytelling, fact-checking, AI

Looking for: AI and immersive technology company; Media professionals covering migration to Europe, interested in further research on the historical aspects of it and preferably having partners among the different Asian communities living in the EU.

Media organisation(s)/professional(s) involved: AudioDots (IL, partner without Stars4Media co-finance)

Idea: Imagine listening to your favourite news site over a smart TV, in your home, while doing daily chores. AudioDots brings text to video-connected devices. News publishers can now have an automated TV channel, reaching new audiences and integrated high-demand advertising traffic. We improve on existing TTS technologies by inserting context-sensitive sentiment and narrative dynamics via the proprietary pre-processing stage. Further, we create, through reinforcement learning, a unique personality to each topic of each publisher – increasing engagement and advertising revenue. We are now deploying the first-ever CTV channels for newspapers, streamlining publisher onboarding and creative process. CTV news apps are trending, and we are the gateway to a whole class of publishers until now banned from this lucrative medium.

Keywords: Automated video, TV

Looking for:  We expect the publisher to support the onboarding process, including curation of editorial assets and creating the look and feel of their channel. We also expect them to commit to the production costs and agree to the revenue sharing scheme.