It may be scarcely out of short pants, but the Internet of Things is already a booming industry. Yet many solutions are not yet fully mature; there is a lack of standards, and real end-to-end communication for the IoT is currently still a pipe dream.
- The second round of the joint accelerator program from Cisco, Intel and Deutsche Telekom
- Participants benefit from mentoring and networking and have access to company resources
Startups throng onto the market with fresh ideas, but, despite concrete business ideas, often run aground when trying to spread their professional wings. To enable these young companies a quick market launch and to foster innovation, Cisco, Intel and Deutsche Telekom's hub:raum have brought startups together on an acceleration platform. Challenge Up! is underway for the second time this year.
Options for collaboration
Only 24 of a total of the 300 applicants were invited to Krakow for a three-day workshop with experts in the technology, sales and business development fields from each of the three companies, to sound out the best options for collaboration. At the end of the event, 12 promising teams working in Smart Home, Smart Factory, IT security, data, analytics and IoT platforms were selected to join the program.
12 teams begin their IoT innovation
Within the seven-month promotion program, each startup is assigned a minimum of three mentors, one each from Cisco, Intel and Telekom, which ensures extremely wide-ranging support in the global marketing of their products and services. Participants are given access to the network and contacts of the mentor companies so that they can make connections with customers, investors, component manufacturers and sales departments. Alongside continuous support, the participants also meet with their mentors in five working sessions in Berlin, London, Dublin and Bonn, where they receive an in-depth insight into the way of working and perspective of major corporations.
Innovation through collaboration
As an established company, it is very much worthwhile to promote startups, so that all those concerned can benefit from promising ideas. One good example is Senic from Berlin, inventor of the Nuimo universal controller. With just a single intuitive remote control, the product allows users to control technical devices with gestures. In the Smart Home field, this clever device replaces the smartphone, regulating every possible connected component such as lights, locks, heating thermostats and speakers. Cisco, Intel and Deutsche Telekom plan to integrate Senic's solution into their own systems; at Deutsche Telekom, that will be the Qivicon Smart Home platform.
The intelligent glove
ProGlove was also a participant in the 2015 startup program. The startup invented an intelligent glove that makes work on production lines easier, for example. The intelligent glove communicates constantly with its wearer about his or her work, for example, whether he or she has fitted all of the screws correctly in a particular manufacturing step. And the connected glove can also be very useful in logistics processes: it replaces a barcode scanner, leaving both hands free to use in the warehouse for whatever task may be required. Intel supported ProGlove with start-up funding, and the company guested at Deutsche Telekom's CeBIT 2016 trade fair stand.
The 12 Challenge Up! startups 2016
- Ayyeka (Israel)
- BeeBryte (France)
- Dynamic Components (Germany)
- Emerald Air (Poland)
- eParkomat (Czech Republic)
- Incelligent (Geece)
- NFWare (Germany)
- Smart Worker (Austria)
- TERAKI (Germany)
- Toposens (Germany)
- VisionLabs (Russia)
- WICASTR (UK)
- WiMark Systems (UK)