Next Foundation, Zero Invasive Predators, and Spark Invest in The Cacophony Project

We are very happy to announce that the Next Foundation and Zero Invasive Predators have made a significant contribution that will enable us to accelerate the development of tools for recognising, luring and eliminating predators.

The money from Next Foundation and Zero Invasive Predators will allow us to hire a very experienced senior developer to lead the open source development. We have a great person who will join the project later in the year when the funding kicks in. As well as accelerating the development, it should make sure that we can better coordinate the increasing numbers of contributions from the open source community.

We are also excited about being able to work closely with the Zero Invasive Predator team and test some of our developments in their facilities at Lincoln. Their experienced team are always full of insights as well.

Our data is now hosted by Spark at the CCL data facility. Spark are also providing free data upload on their network so that we can test on their extensive network around New Zealand. In addition, they are providing some hardware in the form of phones to enable a network of monitoring to be set up around the country. Their team of talented engineers are also making technical contributions. A good example of this is Mike Fields’ work on removing human voices from recordings to ensure there are no privacy issues.

All of this sets us up nicely to accelerate developing devices that can monitor, lure, identify and eliminate predators in a vastly more efficient manner. Thanks NEXT, ZIP and Spark!