Kendraio 2020 recap
2020 has been a huge year for Kendraio. We completed the Bloomen project, received funding from Grant for the Web, attended accelerators, spoke at conferences, and even welcomed new members to the team. For the full rundown, read our recap of 2020 below.
Grant for the Web
We’re excited to be funded as a Grant for the Web Flagship Project grantee! Grant for the Web is a fund by Coil, Mozilla, and Creative Commons, rooted in the belief that a healthy internet needs openness and opportunity. The funded projects support the development of an open, fair, and inclusive standard for monetising content on the web.
Our project, Kendraio Pay, centres around innovating web monetisation for the music industry, especially how this technology can be applied to the ecosystem of streaming services, artists, and listeners. This project will run into 2021 and we will keep you informed.
Kendraio partners with CMO Teosto
In February 2020, after months of hard work, Kendraio and Finnish CMO Teosto were able to unveil their collaboration. To quote the press release:
“Finnish CMO Teosto and interoperability advocacy initiative Kendraio have completed the first part of their collaborative project to develop a user interface for a copyright API aimed to foster new prototypes of data sharing solutions for Teosto’s clients. The new UI can search data from Polaris Works API in various, highly flexible ways.”
We hope this user interface will enable Teosto to pilot new ways for their partners to access their database and demonstrate how data sharing can benefit music rights holders and their partners alike.
Building a Coronavirus dashboard
When the pandemic hit in March the world was in disarray. Cracks started to show and it became increasingly obvious that governments and health authorities all around the world were ill-equipped to deal with a crisis where the response relied so heavily on accurate, up-to-date data and, more importantly, on the sharing of it.
Interoperability is the core message we want to promote at Kendraio, so we decided to shift our focus a little to explore how interoperability and data portability could help the public in understanding and coping with the Covid 19 crisis. So we built a Coronavirus dashboard within Kendraio App.
This dashboard is fully customisable and able to pull data from multiple APIs and display, compare and analyse them in one graph. This flexibility shifts control of analytics and visualisation away from data publishers towards users themselves. In our data-driven world, the way we see data determines how we see reality, so it’s more important than ever for us to be able to make our own decisions. Read more about how we built the Coronavirus dashboard.
Collaborating with Bandsintown
As part of our continuing effort to integrate with different music services, we teamed up with Bandsintown and helped them test and develop their new artist-facing API. This Flow enables artists and managers to add new and modify existing events and is now available in Kendraio App. In the near future, we will add the ability to publish and manipulate your band’s gigs on multiple services (adding services such as Songkick) and add bulk uploading to multiple services.
Wallifornia Music Tech Conference and Next Stage Challenge
In May, Kendraio was selected to participate in the Next Stage Challenge 2020 Virtual Hackathon. This challenge aims to find solutions that can help artists, promoters and others affected by the global lockdown, to explore new experiences and business models for the current crisis and beyond. After a week of hard work, we got the good news: We won! Alongside five other great projects, we were given the opportunity to participate in a gruelling six weeks virtual accelerator organised by LeanSquare and Wallifornia Music Tech, culminating in pitching Kendraio at the Wallifornia Music Tech conference to a live audience, investors and music industry professionals. Watch Daniel Harris’ pitch below.
Even though we were the odd one out as a nonprofit, it was a great opportunity to see which lessons from start-up culture we could apply to our own project and how we could enhance our approach to collaborations and partnerships in the future. We also had the opportunity to speak about Kendraio and our experience with the accelerator and hackathon alongside the organisers of both Wallifornia Music Tech as well as the Next Stage Challenge at a panel at Athens Music Week 2020.
Bloomen Week and the end of the Bloomen project
After three years, we completed the EU Horizon 2020 funded Bloomen project. The aim was to investigate the use of Blockchain in the creative industries through three media use cases: Music, Photo, and Video.
This summer, as part of its end-of-project activities, the Bloomen consortium organised Bloomen Week, an event to showcase research, demo the use cases, and lead conversations with industry professionals.
As part of this event, Kendraio founder Daniel Harris spoke to Turo Pekari from Teosto about the future of copyright management organisations and what problems new technologies will need to be able to solve. You can watch their talk here:
New team members
In addition to all the work we did, we also welcomed two new team members to Kendraio: Lena Pagel and Antonio Talarico.
Lena Pagel is a student, studying Creative Business in the Netherlands, who joined Kendraio as a volunteer in February 2020. With a background in marketing and business development, Lena’s main responsibilities have been marketing and communications, especially managing social media accounts and the Kendraio website. Furthermore, Lena also helps with applications for funding, as well as strategy and business advice.
Antonio Talarico joined Kendraio in June 2020, originally to support Kendraio throughout the Wallifornia Music Tech accelerator. Since then, Antonio has stayed on and played a vital role in outreach, project development and, specifically, the development of Kendraio Pay, our Grant for the Web project.
We want to further expand our team in 2021 so if you like what we do and have an idea of how you could contribute, get in touch with us at info[@]kendra.io.
Kendraio App is a project by Kendraio, the interoperability advocacy initiative. Kendraio App is an open-source dashboard application currently focused on music/media creators, copyright and related rights owners. The app was developed to investigate how the transformative benefits of interoperability can improve existing processes — and to demonstrate how they can impact business, personal and public life.
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