Welcome 2021

Let’s bring on the new year!

BUT FIRST LETS LOOK AT THE HIGHS AND LOWS FROM OUR 2020

D

We wish you all a good health and happy new year! ear PiqlPartners and friends

Bendik Bryde and Patricia Alfheim representing Piql at the Github Universe in San Fransisco.

2020 has been a challenging year, for Piql included, but despite this, we remain optimistic for 2021.

We set out on a positive note in 2020 with ambitions of growth in revenue and with a positive bottom line, but then came COVID19! On March 13th I came back from Bangkok after having con- ducted a launch of the piqlReader at the Norwegian Embassy and discovered that Norway was in a full lock-down. We had to send everyone home with some staff in temporarily reduced positions. The whole world went into a serious lock-down and all our Piql Partners were unable to conduct any relevant activi- ties with potential clients. All business stopped. Now 10 months later, we are again almost in the same situation, Norway is in a partial lock-down until January 18th, and infection numbers are skyrocketing as ever before. In early March we had a major deal with an Italian client in our hands, a total contract value of EUR 2,4 million arranged with financing from the Norwegian Eksportkreditt secured with a bank guaran- tee from an Italian bank. Only formalities with the Loan Agreement between Eksportkreditt and the client remained, but unfortunately, the effect of the Pandemic in Italy has been severe and (almost without exception) the credit rating of all Italian banks was downgraded. Suddenly, the bank guaran- tee was no longer acceptable for Eksportkreditt - deal lost! Two of our Piql Partners have been ill from covid-19, and many of their families and friends as well as many of our collaborators have also been ill, but fortunately are well again. At the moment, we are seeing a global shift (for both the public and private sector) where budgets are being shifted from long-term storage, archiving and preservation onto more pressing matters. We foresee challenging times ahead for all of us, but we are taking measures to face these challeng- es with proactivity and innovation. This is a tough climate to do business in, but we persist, along with our global network of Piql Part- ners, and continue to do our very best. There is optimism among us as we enter the new year; Life and business needs to move on in these demanding times, and the world will recover!

DESPITE 2020 BEING A DEMANDING YEAR, WE HAVE ACHIEVED SOME GREAT THINGS:

• We have delivered our biggest preservation job as well as the largest deposit in the Arctic World Archive (AWA) with the GitHub archival program. A major reference for us, GitHub has given us massive media attention (over 600 media articles from all corners of the world), which already has led to several new projects. We expect more business to come with GitHub, and they have recently expressed interest for our Virtual Machine projects. • As a result of the GitHub publicity, we attracted attention from renowned institutions in the US, including the University of Illinois where we are delivering a digital preservation pilot for student theses and environmental climate data. In addition, Yale University , who is also involved in a global Ini- tiative preserving valuable software, is preserving a sample of its Emulation as a Service data for eterni- ty on piqlFilm as first step of collaboration with the organisation.

• We

successfully final commissioning and delivery of the Norwegian Health Archive project . This has been a major development effort from our R&D team that has given us valuable knowledge and insights into the domain of health record preservation. Further, we have secured a 10-year support contract and already can see that further developments will be required. completed the

A happy bunch at the opening of the new Health Archive at Tynset.

• We have shipped our new and award-winning piql- Reader to eight partners around the globe for demonstrations and piloting activities. Two more will be shipped early this year. These activities are performed as part of our Piql-GO Horizon 2020 project.

• In October we did a very successful virtual launch of the piqlReader in Madrid, Spain. We had great support from the Norwegian Embassy and Innovation Norway in Madrid. The event was attended by more than 60 existing and potential clients. We plan to do similar events in Barcelona and Malaga, involving local clients.

• The Norwegian Defence Museum has become an important and pioneering client for us. Not only are they saving their important digital assets on piqlFilm with a copy in the Arctic World Ar- chive, they are also the first early adopter of piql- Connect, and now at the end of last year they also acquired a piqlReader for their internal use.

Roberto Gonzalez from Piql Iberia and the Norwegian Ambassador to Spain mr. Johan Christopher Vibe.

Piql handing over the piqlReader to the Norwegian Defence Museum.

Olga Tokarczuk, Literature laureate from Poland, has stored her life’s work of 14 books on piqlFilm in the safety and security of AWA, for perpetuity.

• In October, we travelled to Svalbard with some of our Norwegian clients, with many international clients with us in spirit, for an intimate AWA depos- iting ceremony . To name a few of the deposits: the Norwegian National Museum came for the third time todeposit someof theirmost importantworks, the Swedish Modern Museum deposited a copy of its entire art database of 140,000 pieces, Polish author, Olga Tokarczuk, became the first Nobel Prize Laureatetomakeadepositwithher complete literary works, and AWA also received photos from Ajanta Caves, the first UNESCO World Heritage deposit. This last project created news all around the world, and the Indian Prime Minister, Naren- dra Modi, mentioned AWA and the depos- it of Ajanta Caves paintings in the Mann Ki Baat speech to the nation on November 29th: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc0JIvSpVGY (from timecode 3:10). • You can learn more about all the deposits in AWA here: https://cld.bz/vate41p

• On the R&D side we have made major steps forward on our Virtual Machine projects , iVM (immortal Virtual Machine) and VirtuMa. We have successfully been able to deploy a prototype of a Virtual Ma- chine that will be included on piqlFilm to facilitate easier retrieval of data in the future. Both these projects will be completed within Q1 this year.

• We virtually launched Piql in Indonesia with help of the Norwegian Embassy and Innovation Norway, with a demonstration of the new piqlReader. Both the press and potential clients were present, and this was the first time most of the attendants (50+) heard about Piql.

• As part of piqlFilm-GO , our second Horizon 2020 project, we have conducted a range of pilot proj- ects with the new piqlFilm across most of our Part- ners’ regions. Several of these have been converted to paying clients and we expect more to come in 2021.

• Last fall we pre-launched our new software plat- form, piqlConnect . The platform supports online ingest and retrieval of data from the offline stor- age medium, piqlFilm, while also delivering online storage and fast access to the client's data, with full overview of their archive. While piqlConnect initial- ly has been designed for our core markets within archiving and digital preservation, we see that this platform also will open up for B2B2B business that should scale up our distribution and reach signifi- cantly. We are already in dialogue with the first po- tential B2B2B partners that will interface piqlCon- nect through API's that are in development.

• We have completed the delivery of the first dig- ital transformation and preservation project to European Space Agency (ESA) . We expect sev- eral smaller projects to follow this first one in 2021, and we are just now working on a proposal for a major tender in collaboration with Piql Ibe- ria and Piql Italy. ESA is also waiting on the first opportunity to make a deposit in the AWA.

• We started a new R&D project late this summer, BevariiE (funded by the Norwegian Research Coun- cil), where we aim to double the data capacity on piqlFilm, half the cost, and quadruple the longevity (up to 2000 years in AWA). Don't say that we don't have high ambitions.

• We also kicked off a new project, AV-Treasure (funded by Eurostars/Norwegian Research Council), to combine the benefits of digitisation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), crowdsourcing and digital

preservation to the large collections of audio-visu- al heritage content currently sitting on out-of-date media rendering contents inaccessible. This project seeks to build a platform that enables the con- tent to be findable through automated (through AI) and crowdsourced metadata extraction and reusable by today’s film and documentary makers. • At the end of last year, we were awarded support for an important innovation project by Innovation Norway, AWAConnect . This project will develop a fully digital, self-service, high-end, storytelling, service journey with a virtual experience for de- posits in AWA. It will all be built on piqlConnect and will extend its functionality and application in both width and depth. Further this project targets to build a data retrieval centre with a piqlReader at Svalbard. • Last fall, we began engagement in an Innovation Norway program, Global GrowthUNProcurement , to explore if we can do business with the UN, ei- ther directly or indirectly through partners that are already providing services to the UN and their projects around the world. If we can "crack the UN- code", there can definitely be interesting opportu- nities for us. • We are developing an important project, Ama- zonian Indigenous Lives , with Indigenous peo- ple of the Amazon, along with Brazilian partners, where we aim to raise EUR 3,5 million for the purpose of recording and preserving indigenous memories, history, traditions, and cultures. This project is contributing to the protection and rec- ognition of the rights of the indigenous people to ensure that the indigenous culture and there- fore, that the Amazon forest will live! Read more about this project here: https://cld.bz/HOyDKyt

INTERNAL PROCESSES

• In 2020, we conducted an external assessment of our digital strategy (i.e. what we do in "software" and beyond our piqlFilm, piqlBox, piqlWriter, piqlRead- er etc.). This has proven very helpful and has led to improved methods, priorities and focus within software development and product management. We are heading in the direction of converting piql- Connect (and AWAConnect) to a Software as a Ser- vice, with the support of an experienced partner to help us transition. We are therefore becoming more and more a software services company with a unique hardware solution as the core of our ser- vices. No one in this world has anything similar!

• Our Functional Activities within Product Strategy & Launch, Customer Acquisition, Business Perfor- mance Management and Corporate Development have also been through an external assessment, where we scored above average. The assessment also highlighted areas where we can develop, and we are focussed on understanding more, learning, and improving. • Our network of Piql Partners is expanding, with many interested organisations hearing about us from the media coverage and initiating contact. Our focus is to work with the main Piql Partners, supporting them with knowledge and shared expe- riences and references and building a network of resellers and multipliers around them. Our online Piql Academy is an efficient tool to train new staff with existing Piql Partners and onboard new ones.

• Our brand building, marketing and communication is more and more efficient and successful, resulting in more inbound calls than ever. AWA is a fantastic tool to create attention for what we do!

• Last, but not least, we have a clear focus on being a sustainable and responsible business in everything we do, remaining transparent in how we are taking steps forward and supporting the UN Sustainability Goals. AWA is without doubt the data storage fa- cility in the world that has the lowest carbon foot- print!

• We have strengthened the product management of piqlConnect by engaging the project manager we had for the Norwegian Health Archive to take the responsibility as technical and commercial product owner for our new software platform.

Rev. 01-21 | Piql AS © 2021 | All rights reserved.

We remain committed and persistent in our activities and we are hopeful and working hard towards making 2021 our most successful year yet, filled with great out- comes for Piql, building strong references and generating good, sustainable, and recurring business from satisfied clients.

MAKE SURE TO FOLLOW US

www.piql.com

www.arcticworldarchive.org