Amazon WebServices is hosting a series of summits around the world, with the purpose of raising awareness about cloud computing and the AWS platform. After recent events in New York, Milan, and Berlin, it was time for AWS Summit to come to Stockholm. A central theme was how cloud based architectures can accelerate innovation in business of all sizes, and this question was addressed from several different angles through out the day.

In a breakfast session hosted by Swedish MAM providers Vidispine, the focus was on the transformative power of metadata. Among the invited speakers were Johanna Björklund of the MICO team who spoke about multimedia information retrieval and the MICO platform, and Serdar Akalinl who presented a metadata-enriched cloud service that makes Swedish top league soccer games available moments after the game ends.

One of the conclusions from the session was that metadata is increasingly used to package content item for a particular output, for example, webcasts or more traditional forms of play out. Another lesson is that metadata annotation is still largely a manual process, with the downside of being time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone. The interest in machine-supported alternatives is rising, though awareness of the state-of-the art is low.