Digital media platform Kyte has won the 2008 Popkomm Innovation in Music Entertainment Award (IMEA) in Berlin.
The San Francisco-based service — which allows artists to produce live and on-demand content and simultaneously distribute it to multiple online/mobile platforms — beat out five other nominees in a public vote by Popkomm delegates, scooping a €3000 prize and a free stand at Popkomm 2009. Billboard is a media partner of the awards.
“We’re very honoured as a U.S. company to win a prize in Europe,” Kyte president/CEO Daniel Graf told Billboard.biz. “This should give our business a great start in Europe.”
Graf says investors in the business, which has its European base in Zurich, include Nokia, Disney and Spanish telecom giant Telefonica. He credits 50 Cent’s adoption of the service as “the moment things snowballed” in the United States, claiming Fiddy’s Kyte channel has since clocked up 38 million views.
The other finalists were BMAT (Spain), a technology that rates singers’ in ordre to improve their vocal technique; Independent IP (Netherlands), which developed the FUGA business-to-business platform that delivers content to retailers; free on-demand music service Roccatune (Germany) and music recommendation engines Rawrip (United States) and the Filter (United Kingdom).
Previous winners of the award include Gracenote, SonicBids and Playlouder MSP.
