NGI Sargasso Newsletter - April 2024: Last Chance to Apply for our Open Call 3 to Get up to €100,000 Equity-free Funding
In Spring not only the flowers blossom, but also the NGI Sargasso equity-free funding. We have up to €100,000 to distribute to innovators willing to create an Internet of Trust with open source technologies.
Whether you are a startup or SME, university or research centre, or NGO or foundation based in Europe, the US or Canada, tomorrow you have a date with us that you cannot miss: the NGI Sargasso Last Open Call 3 Info Webinar and Matchmaking Session!
- 17 April at 16:00 CEST / 09:00 CDT.
- Online - Save your spot here.
In the first part of the Info Webinar you will discover all the benefits of our open call, including up to €100,000 funding, mentoring and coaching, and an up to 9-month capacity-building program.
The second part will focus on the matchmaking and networking activities for Europeans to find their partner from the US or Canada, and vice versa, since the applications have to be made jointly by Transatlantic teams.
The NGI Sargasso Open Call 3 - Apply before the 15th of May
The objective of this webinar is to reach potential applicants for our third open call, accepting applications until the 15th of May, 2024.
- The first step is to find your Transatlantic partner: Europeans need a counterpart from the US or Canada, and vice versa.
- The second step is to develop your joint proposal to shape a more human-centric Internet.
- The third and last step is to submit your joint application.
If you are from Europe, you can start your Transatlantic journey here.
And if you are from the US or Canada, you can start yours here.
But we not only need innovators for our open call, we also need evaluators willing to carefully review each of the submitted proposals. That is why we invite you to become an external evaluator for the NGI Sargasso open calls. But hurry up, we need you to submit your profile before the 18th of April, 2024!
We're looking for specialists who meet the following criteria:
- European or from Horizon Europe associated countries.
- Scientists or business experts from academia or industry.
- Experience in evaluating proposals for the European Commission or similar.
The NGI Sargasso events of February and March 2024
Those working in innovation and connectivity know that the annual February event is, without any doubt, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and with it, its startup event, 4YFN. As a project focused on promoting the Transatlantic cooperation for Next Generation Internet (NGI) technologies, NGI Sargasso couldn’t miss this relevant date. We organized our own NGI Sargasso panel to offer our equity-free funding opportunities for Next Generation Internet ideas.
We invited Monique Calisti, NGI - The Next Generation Internet Outreach Office Director, and three of the beneficiaries from our first open call:
- EvORAN: Jordi Mongay Batalla, from the Warsaw University of Technology, spoke about what lies beyond in Open-RAN network evaluation. He is collaborating with Huobing Herbert Song, from the University of Maryland. Together, they are unraveling the mysteries of EvORAN – the Evaluation of Open-RAN Network Equipment Including Underlying.
- EBSI-CAN: Lluís Alfons Ariño Martin, Deputy to Manager and Commissioner of Open Gov. and ICT for strategic planning of ICT and resources at Rovira i Virgili University, made us wonder about the potential of EBSI in cross-border credentialing. Lluís, along with Alex Grech and Klaudia Gyorgyi Farkas, from the 3CL Foundation, are exploring in their collaborative project just that with EBSI-CAN: EBSI and Verifiable Credentialing in Canada.
- D3ICA: Julien Bringer, the CEO of Kallistech,shared the answer to the question ‘How can we democratize digital identity?’ His project, D3ICA: Democratizing Decentralized Digital Identity through Cloud Agents, focuses on diversity, inclusion, usability, and interoperability.
You can read all about our panel we hosted on the 27th of February here. A bit more than a week later, we were welcoming our second open call innovators in their OnCampus Welcome Day, celebrated in the afternoon of the 7th of March. They aboard an innovative Transatlantic journey to unleash the Future of the Internet with us.
These nine projects were selected after closing our second open call with 80 Internet innovators ready to redesign the Internet of the Future for our generations to come:
- DPP-CRC: Digital Product Passport for Carbon-Reduced Concrete.
- DES: Decentralized Electronic Signature using Blockchain based Digital Identity.
- GUARDIAN: Detection and Recovery from Ransomware for Attacks to Data in Motion.
- HPQCSSI: Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptography Self-Sovereign Identity Stack.
- Melisseus: Large Language Models as Defensive Honeypots.
- RSFA: Rosseta Stone for APIs.
- SIDIHub: Sustainable & Interoperable Digital Identity.
- Trustless Democracy: Decentralized Digital Sovereign Identity and Voting System using Blockchain Technology.
- VeriRecruit: AI-Driven Interview Analysis for Precision Hiring.
The OnCampus Welcome Day for our second open call beneficiaries was our first of many events in March, followed by many others: the NGI Initiative Coordinators Meeting, the EIC Summit 2024 – Research and Innovation Week, Transfiere 2024, the Sploro NGI Cascade Funding Info Webinar, and our NGI Sargasso Open Call 3 Info Webinar and Matchmaking Session I.
As you can see, these past months have been quite busy at NGI Sargasso, but we want to make sure that Internet innovators join us in our mission of shaping a sustainable and human-centric Next Generation Internet!
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This newsletter was originally published on NGI Sargasso LinkedIn.
The NGI Sargasso Events of March 2024: From the NGI Coordinators Meeting to our Open Call 3 Info Webinar & Matchmaking Session
In February, we told you that those working in innovation and connectivity know that the annual February event is without any doubt the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and with it, its startup event, 4YFN. As Internet innovators, at NGI Sargasso we couldn't miss the date, and besides attending it, we also organized our own panel "NGI Sargasso: Equity-free funding for your Next Generation Internet idea".
But with March, many other events came, and we have decided to list them below to tell you what we have been up to lately, so keep reading to discover more about our activities!
The NGI Initiative Coordinators Meeting
On the 13th and 14th of March, Teresa Barber, Innovation Project Manager at Mobile World Capital Barcelona, represented NGI Sargasso at the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Initiative Coordinators Meeting. During these two days, she looked for synergies with the rest of the NGI funded projects, especially with our sibling projects NGI Enrichers and NGI Transatlantic, supported by our Project Officer, Stergios Tsiafoulis.
EIC Summit 2024 - Research and Innovation Week
Our partner Mobile World Capital Barcelona attended the Research and Innovation Week at the EIC Summit 2024 in Brussels. Marta Portalés, Head of European Projects, spent some days at the European Innovation Council Summit (18-21 March 2024) meeting and networking with the different ecosystem stakeholders: start-ups, procurers, researchers, policy makers and investors. She organized 1-on-1 meetings with the event participants to present them the NGI Sargasso funding program to shape a human-centric Next Generation Internet with a Transatlantic partner and up to €100,000 equity-free funding.
Since we foster Transatlantic cooperation through joint projects of teams of innovators formed by one counterpart from Europe and another counterpart form the USA or Canda, she talked to the USA, Canadian and European potential applicants for our Open Call 3, accepting applications until the 15th of May.
Transfiere 2024
Our third event of March wasn't it Brussels, it was in the Spanish city of Málaga. Again, our partner Mobile World Capital Barcelona spent the 21st and 22nd of March promoting our Open Call 3, aiming to reach potential applicants from Europe to join us in our mission of creating an Internet of Trust.
Transfiere is Europe’s largest event on R&D&I and knowledge transfer connecting the entire Spanish innovation system and boosting its international projection. We were looking for Internet innovators interested in topics such as trust, data sovereignty, digital identity, Internet architecture and renovation, decentralized technology, interoperability and standardization, and new internet commons.
Sploro NGI Cascade Funding Info Webinar
On the 22nd of March, our partner Sploro gathered the NGI-funded projects NGI Mobifree, NGI Commons, NGI Zero Core, NGI Taler and us, NGI Sargasso, in a webinar to present our funding opportunities and open calls for Internet innovators, distributing between 50,000€ and 100,000€ equity-free funding. At this info webinar, they delved into these NGI groundbreaking projects driving the evolution of the Internet towards a trusted and inclusive digital ecosystem.
NGI Sargasso Open Call 3 Info Webinar and Matchmaking Session I
And last, but not least, we closed the month of March with our own event to promote the NGI Sargasso Open Call 3. On the 26th, the NGI Sargasso team hosted an info webinar followed by a matchmaking session for potential open call applicants from Europe, the USA and Canada to provide them valuable guidance to our funding program. The session consisted of two parts:
- The first part featured an overview of the available benefits, the application process, and the selection criteria.
- The second part focused on a dedicated matchmaking session to help attendees find their Transatlantic partner in several networking tables.
In case you missed it, and you are also interested in applying for our third open call, we are hosting a second NGI Sargasso Info Webinar and Matchmaking Session on the 17th of April at 16:00 CEST / 09:00 CDT to which we invite you to register now!
Join NGI Sargasso in our mission to build and Internet of Humans and an Internet of Trust!