On the edge of technology: AI, Blockchain, and how they will transform the Creative Industry.

We started CloudBounce in 2015, with the idea of how new modern technologies could help musicians in the creative process, namely audio mastering. After receiving very positive feedback from professional musicians, and an intro from a good friend Bil Bryant (thank you!) we ended up applying for the Abbey Road Red tech incubator. After a rigorous pitching session and rounds of evaluation… we got in. The legendary recording, mixing and mastering studio wanted us into the program. We can consider that this was the point in time where the big gears of innovation started to move.

The journey from music to all audio content
At first, our business idea was to offer instant, cloud-based audio mastering for musicians, producers, DJs and recording studios. During our program at Abbey Road we focused on signing up artists, and music tech companies as partners to offer our mastering to all of their users. But at the same time, behind the scenes, we explored into other audio content as well, and how we could help every content creator on this planet achieve a professional sound without the big investment of a) acquiring audio editing software, b) taking the time to learn audio post production, and c) spending hours and hours to make those videos and podcasts sound professional and optimized for todays streaming standard.In late 2016, we secured our first actual seed round, and started to develop the 2nd version of our audio engine, which would be capable of handling all types of audio instead of just music. We invested our seed funds and got an R&D project from Tekes (currently Business Finland), the Finnish funding agency for technology and innovation to build this next incarnation of our automated audio processing tool.So we spent all of 2017 building the prototype, doing R&D on different kinds of content; live streams, vlogs, reviews, outdoor recordings, funny home videos, podcasts — all recorded with various equipment ranging from smart phones to action cams to professional gear. What we found out is that the majority of content online suffers from bad audio quality; be it a background noise, over-limiting, low loudness levels, room echo and all sorts of anomalities. After heavy rounds of R&D, we are soon ready to release the 3rd version of our engine, which will be capable of automatically detecting unwanted features from e.g. your podcast recording, and remove them while at the same time optimizing the audio for streaming on YouTube and Facebook.Now we only have one problem. (and a solution, and you are a part of it)

Machine Learning and the food it needs
They say “data is for machine learning what food is for humans”. This couldn’t be more spot on. In order to get better, an autonomous audio production system (mastering, optimizing, enhancement) requires a vast collection of audio features to chew through the machine learning funnel. Teaching the machine learning models require thousands and thousands of audio files to be able to identify and learn what needs to be fixed in order to make the recording sound as good as it can.So essentially, we have the technology and the know-how, but we are missing the most important ingredient — food.

The solution: You.
With a 40,000 strong community already (humble thanks for being a part of it, by the way), we believe that we can build the biggest, most comprehensive AI Audio production system in the world. Many of our current users have vast collections of audio, some even create videos and podcasts. So if you were to contribute into building this AI, and if there were enough of like-minded creators like you, we could build a tool that will help millions of content creators make their video and audio content sound professional — automatically.

The next things to consider are: 

1. how to reward you for your contributions,
2. what happens when there are over 10,000 contributors from e.g. 90 countries, 
3. how we could do all of this automatically and
4. without the need to trust a 3rd party to handle the rewards?

Enter blockchain and smart contracts. We have decided to implement the micro payment mechanisms and contributor rewards into smart contracts that will run on the Ethereum network.

Here is a good explanation of what a smart contract is (source):
“Smart contracts help you exchange money, property, shares, or anything of value in a transparent, conflict-free way while avoiding the services of a middleman.The best way to describe smart contracts is to compare the technology to a vending machine. Ordinarily, you would go to a lawyer or a notary, pay them, and wait while you get the document. With smart contracts, you simply drop a bitcoin into the vending machine (i.e. ledger), and your escrow, driver’s license, or whatever drops into your account. More so, smart contracts not only define the rules and penalties around an agreement in the same way that a traditional contract does, but also automatically enforce those obligations.”

So, in essence, we are going to:

1. Transition into a tokenized ecosystem, where users pay for services with dB Tokens, and on the other side users earn dB Tokens from making contributions into the platform (help build the AI, do QA, and other tasks)
2. Build a local processing client, enterprise integration tools, partner API that are fueled by the dB Token — effectively opening up the Audio AI for all to use
3. Involve the global creator community (musicians, engineers, video makers, etc.) in the whole ecosystem

Join the community, get your first 100 DB tokens
We want to invite you to the journey as well, which is why we are doing a big dB Token Airdrop for our users and community (up to 80,000,000 DB tokens). 

Join the Airdrop here (valid until March 31, 2018):
https://www.cloudbounce.com/dbounce

Come talk with us in our Telegram channel:
https://t.me/dBounce

Read our White Paper:
https://goo.gl/YN2mUR (Google Docs)

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, as well.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anssiuimonen/

Humble thanks for reading this, and being a part of our community.

Tampere, March 6, 2018
Anssi Uimonen
Co-founder, CEO