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Applications are open until October 15 for the Telekom Innovation Contest 2015, which is looking for innovative startups and entrepreneurs worldwide.
The contest was co-founded in 2013 by Telekom Innovation Laboratories (T-Labs), T-Mobile Poland, and Magyar Telekom Hungary to find and grow the best ideas for the future.
Startups and entrepreneurs can enter in three categories – Smart Data Analytics, Future Communication, or Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things. The contest is only open to mature entries that have a working prototype to display.
Teams that apply and are successful in joining the contest will be invited to take part in the Innovation Expo on November 12 in Budapest. Teams will have a chance to exhibit their business at the expo and meet with decision makers from Telekom’s business and venture arms.
Each startup will have their own booth at the expo for networking as well as an opportunity to pitch their ideas live on stage and convince investors and Deutsche Telekom decision makers to meet for a one on one pitch.
As an additional prize, an expert jury will choose three teams to be invited to the Hub conference organised by the Digital Association of Germany, Bitkom. The event takes place on December 10, 2015 in Berlin and brings disruptive trends, smart technologies and the people behind them together.
“For Deutsche Telekom startups are an important source of impulses and we are always seeking for entrepreneurs. We are excited to see which bright minds we will meet at the Expo in Budapest,” said Dr. Heinrich Arnold, senior vice president of innovation & laboratories at Deutsche Telekom and global head of Telekom Innovation Laboratories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fGO5pqLqqU
Startups that have competed at the Telekom Innovation Contest over the last two years have gone on to use the momentum to further their products and services. One of last year’s winners T-Parking, from the Czech Republic, developed an app for finding on and off street parking. The team went on to take part in the pre-incubator programme at Deutsche Telekom’s internal incubator UQBATE before the launching its first app, Franelero, which is currently being piloted in Prague.
2013’s winners Excalibur, from Slovakia, created a new kind of password manager that authenticates your identity through your mobile phone, which the startup hopes will do away with passwords. The startup recently won the Kaspersky Security Startup Challenge.
“We worked closely with DT, many in person meetings that sometime were really tough as we wanted to verify that our crypto is sound,” said CEO Ivan Klimek of his startup’s time at the Telekom contest. “It was intense, but worth it. We knew that when we can stand the criticism of the best experts DT can throw at us then it might not be such a bad idea to build this cryptosystem.”
This year’s Telekom Innovation Contest was launched in early September in Berlin at Startup Night where one “wild card” ticket for the Innovation Expo Budapest was handed out. Berlin-based online store data analytics startup Shopboostr picked up the prize with CEO and co-founder Dimitri Haußmann accepting the award (see photo above).
Telekom Innovation Contest is also supported by Deutsche Telekom’s various incubators like hub:raum in Berlin, Krakow, and Tel Aviv; Kitchen Budapest; and UQBATE as well as the Telekom Innovation Laboratories and Deutsche Telekom Group Companies operating in Europe.
Applications are open until October 15; click here for information.
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