Kendra Initiative

The Kendra Initiative founded by Daniel Harris in late 1999 is an open source initiative to create ways of using the Internet to discover, use, share and pay for digital media such as music, web content, books and films. Kendra seeks to foster an open distributed marketplace for digital media. Kendra has over 1000 participants from more than 50 countries. It maintains a website and wiki detailing its project activities and pilot trials.

Kendra's goals are to:

* Simplify and streamline buying and selling digital content by driving industry adoption of open protocols. * Enable interoperability between service providers, media applications and devices - every link in the content value chain. * Build a system where consumers can use any device or application to browse, search and purchase from the globally distributed collection of content catalogues. * Create a more pleasurable buying experience for consumers and increase reach and revenue for content owners.

Kendra participants build practical demonstrations of proposed systems by conducting pilot trials: catalogue, rules, interface, commerce, network, etc. with the aim to drive interoperability between all of the participants.

For example Kendra enables all catalogue owners to publish data about their content. Showing that searches of all of these distributed catalogues can be accomplished as if they were one. Kendra is seeking similar objectives for payment service providers with a payment framework analogous to our current banking system.