iNEM4U is a research project carried out by a European consortium of companies and institutions, co-funded by the European Commission. Its goal is to develop an open and intelligent service platform that enables groups of people, such as families and friends, to share media and services in an easy and integrated way. The iNEM4U platform facilitates such experiences by allowing applications to easily combine media and services from different networks, such as the Internet, IPTV networks, and mobile networks. Developing and operating such applications is currently very cumbersome as each network forms a separate domain of technology, which, for example, uses its own user identities and metadata formats. This limits the multimedia experience of consumers and hinders the materialization of new service concepts and business models for sharing multimedia experiences. Besides R&D into technology, iNEM4U also addresses business models made possible by the platform and evaluates the experience of users with services spanning multiple networks (technology domains).
iNEM4U is a collaborative research project. The iNEM4U consortium consists of a well-balanced mix of industrial and research partners from across Europe covering the industry segments that are relevant to the project. The industrial partners are dominant players in the broadcasting industry (IRT), equipment manufacturing (NEC, HP), consumer electronics (Philips, HP), full service delivery (Telenor), and business and system integration (Logica). The research partners in the project (Fraunhofer and Novay) facilitate the flow of scientific knowledge into the project. Together, the consortium facilitates the flow of fundamental knowledge towards real business innovation in many European markets.
Check out the video message of Ms. Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, with which she opened the iNEM4U Closing Event, held at Philips Research on March 31, 2010. There's also a blog post of hers on iNEM4U on her blog at the Comission. Novay has a longer article about her speech on their site (in Dutch).
The research leading to the results of iNEM4U has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 216647.