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!

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.

  1. The first step is to find your Transatlantic partner: Europeans need a counterpart from the US or Canada, and vice versa.
  2. The second step is to develop your joint proposal to shape a more human-centric Internet.
  3. 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.

The NGI Sargasso panel at 4YFN 2024

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:

  1. DPP-CRC: Digital Product Passport for Carbon-Reduced Concrete.
  2. DES: Decentralized Electronic Signature using Blockchain based Digital Identity.
  3. GUARDIAN: Detection and Recovery from Ransomware for Attacks to Data in Motion.
  4. HPQCSSI: Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptography Self-Sovereign Identity Stack.
  5. Melisseus: Large Language Models as Defensive Honeypots.
  6. RSFA: Rosseta Stone for APIs.
  7. SIDIHub: Sustainable & Interoperable Digital Identity.
  8. Trustless Democracy: Decentralized Digital Sovereign Identity and Voting System using Blockchain Technology.
  9. 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.