Headquartered in Mumbai (India), Komli Media is also present in Singapore, New Delhi, Bangalore, London, Melbourne, Sydney, New York, Palo Alto, and Toronto. Their current scope of operations include: Brand Solutions, Performance Network, PostClick, Ethnic Marketing, Indoor Media, and ViziSense.

Meanwhile, Aktiv Digital provides market leading online solutions for publishers, advertising agencies and advertisers alike. It was established in 2007 with the opening of its Singapore headquarters and expanded their offices to Hong Kong, Philippines, Malaysia and China. Since their founding, it has established itself as “the most accessible touch-point for the purchasing of online media for branding, lead generation and acquisition-based objectives”.

From this acquisition, Komli Media might reach 60 million users, expanding from its current 50 million users worldwide. Not only will this acquisition enhance the presence of Komli Media in the current Singapore market, but it will also extend its presence in thse new markets for them: Hong Kong, Malaysia and Philippines.

Hitherto, the company has managed to raise $400K of angel funding as part of its series A. Their 2 lead angels include Jayesh Parekh and Greg Blackwood, both of whom are experienced venture investors.

iSyndica is essentially a cloud-based digital media distribution platform which simplifies online selling by syndicating, promoting and tracking user content on multiple established channels. Their Upload Once – Sell Everywhere™ approach can be highly effective in helping users increase revenue while reducing workload.

iSyndica's Upload Once - Sell Everywhere Approach

Companies specializing in microstock photography are essentially defined by 3 features: first, they source for their images exclusively from online sources. Next these agencies also accept images from a wide range of photographers – this can range from professional photographers to hobbyists and amateurs. Lastly, images are priced at lower rates as compared to traditional stock photo agencies.

The microstock industry has yet to reach its zenith but online photo agencies like Polylooks are rapidly gaining traction as online marketing and publishing becomes du jour for companies in addition to the demand for images for offline marketing and publishing purposes. Morevover, with slimmer marketing budgets, the wide selection of images at lower prices makes it a very viable cost effective alternative compared to purchasing images from traditional agencies.

In fact, in a survey conducted by Polylooks, they found out that in the UK marketing sector alone, 44 per cent of professionals legally download between one and five pictures each month, while seven per cent buy more than 11 stock images each month. Moreover, even though nearly half (48 per cent) of the respondents do not have a microstock image budget, five per cent spend in excess of £100 each month on images. As such there is a big and validated demand for microstock images.

iSyndica’s Distribution Channels

iSyndica's Amazon web services powered Virtual Distribution Server

iSyndica’s distribution also extends to a number of the most popular social sites including Youtube, Viddler, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and Twitpic. iSyndica is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their Virtual Distribution Server (VDS) is a patent pending, multi-category software-as-a-service (SaaS) distribution platform. With the VDS, which is a virtual server within Amazon’s cloud, users upload their works onto the cloud which then automatically distributes it to all the relevant channels on the iSyndica platform. This therefore reduces the need to reiterate the uploading process onto numerous different channels and saves time and effort.

Cool Features That iSyndica Offers

iSyndica compiles sales and revenue and presents them in a clear and understandable manner

iSyndica has also implemented third – party login support – this therefore means that one can login with an existing account from Google, Twitter, Facebook, AOL, Yahoo or Flickr. By so doing, iSyndica has proven to have really thought about their product from the consumer’s point of view and modified it to afford them greater convenience and efficiency. Furthermore, users are also able to voice their opinions to the iSyndica team via the UserVoice feedback system. This tool has indeed been useful for product improvement as iSyndica recently added Paypal as a payment method after listening to user feedback.

Registering With iSyndica

Image credit: Eneva Nayapia

The Singapore Digital Media Festival 2008 is an unique event which is part-conference, part-film festival and part-networking event, DMfest is where IT and media production professionals can engage in meaningful dialogue and discover synergies that will help propel them forward in this market. The event is organized by the Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF). BL, our editor was invited to the festival film screenings held in National Museum and here are some highlights of the event.

The Singapore Digital Media Festival opened today in Gallery Theatre, National Museum with a festival film screenings that capture the interface between creative media and technology. It will be proceeded by a conference focussing on the theme “Television 2.0: Internet Services & New Media Mashup” in The Legends @ Fort Canning Park tomorrow.

The event started with an interesting opening ceremony with RADM (NS) Ronnie Tay (CEO, IDA Singapore), Tan Yen Yen (Chairman of Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation) and Ng Chong Khim (Chairman, Digital Media Chapter, Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation). The event is hosted by Genevieve Woo, the presenter and producer from ChannelNewsAsia. Formalities aside, it may be interesting to talk about how the evening went.

The festival film screenings take an interesting perspective on films created with the mix of technology and creative arts. For our editor, he managed to catch the first half of the screenings which centered on open source films (user generated films using open source graphics such as Blender), Machinima films (films created out of computer game animation), and live music films. The span for most films are short for the open source films, but in each closing credits, there are just more than a few hundred people involved in the process of making the film. While some might have difficulty appreciating Elephants Dream with two strange characters moving across a precarious and seemingly world dominated by a huge machine (similar to movies like Ghost in the Shell or the Matrix trilogy), the film “Big Buck Bunny” was amazing funny that got the audience laughing out loud.

The Machinima films were screened next, but the organizers only showed parts of the story due to time constraints. They showed Red vs Blue, a well known machima comic science fiction video series of two opposing teams of soldiers fighting a civil war, with a lot of pop culture jokes and sarcastic humour tossing up on the dialogue. Although a few of the audience caught most of the jokes and burst into laughter, it is quite obvious that not many appreciated the humour inside. BloodSpell was a more serious machima film except that it ended abruptly. It is interesting to note that we have not seen such types of creative films made in Asia. That is perhaps where the creative innovators should start looking at how to interface technology with good storyboards.

The highlight of the day was the interview with Mark Schubin, from Metropolitan Opera via a live linkup from the US. Before our host Genevieve took him through a short interview discussing how the Met has able to propagate the operas through the power of technology via satellite transmission and fibre optic cables to other parts of the world, we get the best selection of snippets from different opera done by them. Most of the interview centered on the challenges to convince people that they can get the same experience sitting in a cinema or lecture hall watching an opera transmitting from a live opera house and how to deliver that experience via technology. Of course, the challenge is to eventually use the internet as the platform to distribute the Metropolitan opera in such high quality or new ways of presenting different perspectives in the opera house to an audience who is physically not there.

For that matter, it has been a good evening and we will report more on the conference tomorrow. Here are some pictures for the event:

BL at Singapore Digital Media Festival 2008 with a media pass

Before the Festival Film Screenings start.

Interview with Mark Schubin via live link up

Bloggers at the Singapore Digital Media Festival 2008. From the left: Walter, DK, Daniel (Tech65) and BL