Highlights:

• NKN was chosen as one of the 6 finalists out of over 300 applicants in the Nokia Open Innovation Challenge 2018 and was invited to present at the awards ceremony on December 6th in Murray Hill, NJ, all expenses paid by Nokia.
• NKN is the only blockchain technology company out of the 6 finalists.
• NKN is the youngest company of the 6 finalists, with less than 11 months in operation. The other finalist companies had 2–10 years of history.
• Successfully demo’d our public testnet and applications running on it, including d-Chat messenger and Space Cats 3D action game.
• Successfully pitched to the executive jury, chaired by Nokia CTO and Bell Labs President Marcus Weldon.
• 5 in-depth one-on-one hour-long business and technical discussion with 10 Nokia executives (Mentors), representing Nokia business units from Bell Labs, Strategy and Partnership, IT & Digital Transformation, Mobile Broadband BU, Enterprise BU, and Bell Labs Consulting.

The road to six finalists:

The Nokia Open Innovation Challenge seeks to find new innovative products and solutions with a potential to work with Nokia to create joint solutions.

The entrants went through two assessment rounds:

• First round: filtered through 300+ applications down to 25 shortlists
• Second round: a Nokia wide jury ranked the selected the top 6 finalists

This year’s finalists are:

Finals ceremony

Early in December, 6 finalists were invited to pitch and demonstrate their ideas to an international selection jury at an event held today at the iconic headquarters of Nokia Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J. The selection jury was led by Weldon and was comprised of leaders from across Nokia, Nokia Bell Labs and NGP Capital.

This year’s winners will join a growing list of companies with access to Nokia’s resources to help grow their businesses.

About Nokia

Nokia is a global technology leader with more than 103,000 employees in 130 countries worldwide and an annual revenue of 23 Billion Euros. Powered by the research and innovation of Nokia Bell Labs, the company serves communications service providers, governments, large enterprises and consumers, with the industry’s most complete, end-to-end portfolio of products, services and licensing. Nokia adheres to the highest ethical business standards to create technology with social purpose, quality and integrity. Nokia is enabling the infrastructure for 5G and the Internet of Things to transform the human experience.

About Nokia Bell Labs

Nokia Bell Labs is one of the pre-eminent global research organizations today, with a rich history of solving the great challenges facing the information and communications industry and ‘inventing the future’. It remains focused on that mission, working on the ‘10x’ challenges that confront the evolution of networks and, given the dependence we increasingly have on those networks, the evolution of the future digital society.

In fact, one could argue that there has never been a more exciting time to be undertaking research in these domains. Bell Labs researchers have been recognized by many of the world’s most prestigious technology organizations for their contributions to science, technology and society. 14 of our researchers have shared in 7 Nobel Prizes for Physics and one Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discoveries ranging from the invention of the technologies that serve as the foundation for all information technology, to the nature of subatomic particles and the origins of the universe. And 4 of our scientists have been awarded the Japan Prize, including Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson for developing the UNIX® operating system.

Bell Labs researchers are global leaders in their respective disciplines and conduct fundamental and applied research geared toward solving the most formidable networking and communications challenges confronting our world, in IP and Optical networks, ultra-broadband access (wireless and wired), novel communications platforms and systems, new algorithms and protocols, and advanced virtualization and software-defined networking technologies that underpin today’s Cloud infrastructure. The goal is always to discover breakthrough technologies that will make networks 10x faster, smarter, more scalable and more sustainable.

Bell Labs is a global organization with headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey, with locations throughout the world, and is the research arm of Nokia. It collaborates closely with Nokia’s product development teams and customers to create new information and communications technologies and to bring them to market, or to create novel intellectual property for commercialization by the wider industry.

About NGP Capital

NGP Capital was founded in 2005 with the ambition to offer entrepreneurs something new; A support system of funding, feet on the ground in the world’s largest markets, deep thematic expertise and access to vast networks as well as a technology corporate. We believe growth-stage companies deserve long-term, loyal investors that have both the ambition and the discipline to create significant financial and strategic value.

About NKN

NKN is a new kind of network connectivity protocol & ecosystem powered by blockchain for an open, decentralized, and shared Internet. By blockchainizing the network layer, NKN is providing the missing third pillar of internet infrastructure. Just as Ethereum has done for compute and Filecoin for storage, NKN will decentralize network connectivity and transmission.

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