During this year’s edition of the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona, Spain, a Startup program that aims to help innovative startups focusing on the Internet of Things (IoT) platform to market their solutions faster through joint projects, mentorship, corporate assets and high-value networking was launched.
The startup program, dubbed Challenge UP! is a joint IoT accelerator project by Cisco, Intel and Deutsche Telekom for startups coming from the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, with selected solutions getting the possibility of receiving strategic investment and support to commercialize their products or services for global markets.
The three tech companies will be bringing together resources and experiences from their individual startup initiatives that include Cisco entrepreneurs in Residence (Cisco EIR), Intel Business Challenge Europe and Deutsche Telekom’s hub:raum for the benefit of the program.
“With Challenge Up! we are giving a great signal to the startup world, bringing together the resources and know-how of three corporations. We will use our combined experience for the benefit of the Challenge Up! program and the support of the startup community,” said Elias Drakopoulos, Senior VP responsible for Europe B2B at Deutsche Telekom.
Designed for early-stage startups creating solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) and related areas, the program will focus on startups that are concerned with big data, analytics, information security, connectivity, cloud computing and connected and smart solutions such as smart home, smart city, smart energy, connected cars and wearables among others.
Applications for consideration in the program are currently open and interested startups should visit the Challenge Up site to submit their interest, and once selected the startups will be invited for an Acceleration Week to be held from June 22 to June 26, 2015 followed by a four-month incubation program to run from July to October at no cost for the startups who also get to retain their Intellectual Property (IP).
“We are looking forward to the creative ideas for new products and services from across the region to improve how we live and work together. By giving startups access to the complimentary resources of our three global companies we can help them accelerate their ideas into commercial success,” said Christian Morales, EMEA General Manager at Intel.
Through Challenge UP!, Intel, Cisco and Deutsche Telekom expects to bring together the best of technologies to an ecosystem of open innovation so as to help address the opportunities that have come about, with the year 2020 expected to see 50 billion things connected to the internet.
