HAND (HUMAN & DIGITAL)
CEO: WILL KRETH COUNTRY: USA STARTED: 2021
What’s your origin story? My name is Will Kreth, and for over 30 years I have worked in media and entertainment (M&E) and related tech. I’ve been the executive director of EIDR, as well as the director of metadata management for Showtime. All that experience – and the changes happening in the industry – led me to launch the industry consulting firm Hand (Human & Digital), which is geared towards helping M&E players more easily discover the right talent and technologies. While I was running EIDR as executive director from 2017 to 2019, I learned that Hollywood was looking to create a universal talent identifier and build it from the ground up. But no one had approached the standards bodies who manage PIDs (persistent unique IDs), to develop a talent ID based on the business requirements of Hollywood itself. When I first heard the concept, it made perfect sense, and for some time we had hoped EIDR would be the place to make it happen under the DOI (digital object identifier) Foundation – itself an ISO standard. After I left EIDR in the autumn of 2019, I wanted to start a company – and had a hunch that predictive
That is where I saw a golden opportunity for a new company to really take on the challenge of doing talent ID right, using the time-tested and high-transaction-volume DOI Handle ID System for talent for the first time. What is the company working on right now? At this moment in time, Hand is a B2B talent ID registry that assigns a standard, unique, persistent and verifiable ID to talent. It enables distribution cost savings and production revenue acceleration by automating the process of talent utilisation identification – including name, image and likeness – in both real-world and virtual productions. The Hand ID can be used to identify legal-entity humans, licensed virtual humans and fictional characters in performing arts and sports. What’s the next step? Seed-stage funding, growth, software development, team building – plus we are preparing to demo at the annual HPA Tech Retreat Innovation Zone in California, February 2023. We’ll have a booth! What one thing does the business need most? We’re fundraising our pre-seed round, with a Series A round then planned for early 2023. We are looking for strategic partners to help us with our beta process – as we look to make Hand IDs publicly available in the spring of 2023.
analytics for talent in M&E would be huge in the future, with the power of AI, machine learning and natural language processing becoming affordable and applicable at the supply-chain level. In May 2022, we were one of two winners in the KGC start-up pitch competition. It was great validation for our approach to applying knowledge graph tech to create a powerful talent identity graph. However, the fundamental issue with needing a future-facing talent ID (for performing arts and sports) had not yet been solved. Machine- learning experts talk about how fundamental it is to properly tag data in large data sets, in order to optimally train machine-learning engines. Key master data still needs human subject matter experts to initially tag it correctly. I SAW A CHANCE FOR A COMPANY TO DO TALENT ID RIGHT
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