NEM Foundation Update – July 29, 2018

NEM ecosystem updates for July 29, 2018 (first appeared on NEM Forum)

 

TLDR; Enspiral Dev Academy and Mana Labs partner with NEM, XEM is added to Indodax, NEMsp Network trains fourth company, Japan holds a multi-city NEMber event, NEM Malaysia goes on a global roadshow, Hybrid Summit takes center stage in Bangkok, LATAM expands through events and meetups, and South Korea signs two MoUs with FoundationX and Incublock.

“We’ve received good feedback on these updates, and they prove to be valuable even within the NEM Foundation to better align different regions. At the current speed, I expect we can gradually focus more on achievements than activities in future blog posts.” – Kristof Van de Reck, Interim President

Ongoing Planning Efforts

• Over the past couple of weeks, we have focused on evaluating our current approach to bring NEM to the market. This evaluation proved helpful and will guide us where to improve our plan so that we bring more quality projects and developers on board. NEM’s technology is different than other smart contract blockchains and thus requires another approach which we’re defining now.

Announcements

• XEM has been added to Indodax , one of the largest Indonesian Bitcoin exchanges. Trading is available with Rupiah. (Article)

Global Expansion, New Hires, Notable Events

Argentina

• The Mendoza City meetup has been moved to July 27th.
• NEM Argentina Ambassador, Sasha Ivanova, was interviewed on the 5 Nights Channel 10 Network.
• Planning is underway for the August 1st Entrepreneur City Meetup.

Australia & New Zealand

• Enspiral Dev Academy, New Zealand’s premiere full immersion web development school, is now partnering
• with NEM to train technical talent to work with blockchain.
• The official NEM Blockchain Hub launch kicked off in Epic Westport. Guest speakers included Hon. Damien O’Conor, Lon Wong, Jason Lee.
• Please give a warm welcome to Akasha Indream, also known as Miss Blockchain, who has been brought onboard as NEM Australia’s Communication Director. She has also launched a new NEM video series.
• NEM has announced a collaboration to work with Mana Labs, a community social enterprise with the aim to improve the quality of life of local communities in New Zealand. (Article)

Brazil

• Ambassador Alex Braz coordinated a NEM developer-focused blockchain event at one The Developers Conference, one of the largest conferences in Brazil. The event was well received and resulted in further discussions with EY about NEM’s capabilities.

Chile

• Ambassador Daniel Tolosa participated in the event organized by Business Blockchain where the team gave an introduction on NEM and engaged with Cristóbal Pereira, a coordinator of the Blockchain Summit LATAM.

Europe

• In the past six months, NEM Europe has grown to a team of twelve including three Business Development Leads.
• The NEM Service Partner (NEMsp) Network has completed the training of three companies with another to follow next week. The trial has exceeded expectations, and the popularity of the program has expanded to include high profile partners coming onboard. More details on these partnerships will be shared in the coming week.
• NEM Europe has been invited to speak at a seminar in Kaunas, the med-tech capital of Lithuania, at the Life Sciences Baltics Conference, the largest international life sciences forum in the Baltics. Dignitaries will include a high-level Japanese delegation.
• Talks are progressing with the Head of Health Care Innovation Care Development Center at Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, Deutsche Ventures, and Hy (an Axel Springer subsidiary who consult corporates and startups with digital transformation.)
• NEM Europe will be participating in the Insurlab PoC Workshop in Cologne, Germany. The workshop will be focused on use cases for the insurance industry. The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy’s Digital Hub Initiative promotes digital innovation in Germany and has resulted in the establishment of twelve German digital hubs.

Japan

• Raccoon Wallet 2 PWA version is released and works on iOS, Android and other smartphone’s browser. (Link)
• On June 10th there was a successful NEM developers study meeting called “NEMdev.nagoya#1” in Nagoya, Japan. (Article)
• NEM engineer @DaokaTrade will give a NEM 101 presentation on July 29th at the NEM Bar in Tokyo followed by a Q&A session.
• On July 25th, the NEMber’s gathering party was held in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. Over 50 NEMbers joined the party. Through the event, NEM projects and products were introduced and as a super surprise guest, Lon Wong, from ProximaX joined via Skype from New Zealand. He was celebrating the open of the NEM Innovation Hub in Westport, and spoke to many Japanese Nembers.

LATAM

• LATAM Lead, Pedro Gutierrez, has been confirmed as a speaker at the TecnoFest de Cali, a technology event sponsored by the Mayor of Santiago de Cali – Colombia.
• Talks are progressing with local banks as well as organizers of a notable Botogá scientific event in Columbia.
• Pedro Gutierrez and Alexandra Tinsman (NEM North America) are confirmed speakers at the upcoming Las Vegas ChainXChange event.

Malaysia

• It has been an eventful month for NEM Malaysia! Jasmine Ng, NEM Malaysia’s Director of Investment & Special Projects, gave a presentation on Blockchain 101 as well as the NEM Blockchain Centre at the Asian Blockchain Hub on July 21st. The Asian Blockchain HUB was a one-day conference under the patronage of the European Blockchain HUB that aimed to kick-start the future of blockchain trending in Europe and Asia.
• Southeast Asia Regional Head, Stephen Chia, was interviewed by Money Today Network.
• Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB), Malaysia’s energy provider, held a private Blockchain Awareness Training Session at the NEM Blockchain Centre in Malaysia on 17 July with 150 of their employees in attendance.
• NEM conducted a trade mission to Penang together with the Internet Alliance to experience the growth of Penang in the past ten years and to understand the many initiatives taking place to boost the local economy and startup scene.

Nigeria

• The Nigeria community continues to grow! Austin Martins held a successful NEM 101 meetup in Abuja-Nigeria on Thursday 26th July with around 30 people in attendance.

North America

• Expansion remains underway for North America. No further updates to share at this time as agreements are being put in place with partners and teams.
• Alexandra Tinsman, Regional Head of North America, was interviewed on the Wild West Cryptos Podcast.
• Jeff McDonald, NEM Advisor, gave a talk at the Blockchain Open Forum on “Unlocking Advanced Blockchain Applications.” (Presentation Download)

Philippines

• On July 21st and 22nd, the first 2-day NEM Philippines Developer Workshop was held at STI College Marikina with the help of Anthony Law, Technical Trainer of NEM Malaysia. Eighty-five people attended the event including students, alumni, professors, and developers. Three winners were awarded for a NEM hackathon and the participants were able to create use-cases and applications built in a 24-hour period.
• The 2nd NEM Lucena City Meetup was held on July 21 where CEstates.io presented their real-estate project.
• On July 28th, NEM Philippines will be part of Business Law Conference 2018 to be held in De La Salle University, one of the top Universities in the Philippines together with the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (CEZA) which is a government-owned and controlled corporation. Nelson Valero, Regional Head of Australia and New Zealand, and Emerson Fonseca, Head of NEM Philippines will speak.

SE Asia

• Lance Cheang, Project Director for NEM Southeast Asia, was interviewed by Elaine Ramirez at Blockstreet HQ about all things NEM including NEM’s activities in Malaysia and Japan as well as the launch of the NEM Blockchain Centre in Malaysia.
• Lance Cheang and the NEM Malaysia team visited with companies including Intel, Zebra, Exabytes, EasyParcel, AyuhBina (ACAD), Penang Tech Done, Penang Science Cluster, QDOS, and the Chief Minister and Deputy Chief Minister of Penang.
• NEM Technical Trainer, Anthony Law, mentored the winners of the ‘Most Impactful Project’ Award at the BlockchainSPIRIT Hackathon. The winners, Do Wen Rei, Delveer Singh, and Chia Tze Hank created the ‘Legal-chain’ app which is a solution that uses speech recognition technology to generate court transcripts for legal proceedings.
• Notable Meetups include a Blockchain 101 at the Sabah Ministry of Agriculture and Food Industry (MAFI) on July 17th as well as at Kuching, Sarawak on July 20th at the Borneo744 in collaboration with the Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (MAGic).
• Andy Roy Sian and Jesyka Hiu from NEM SEA Business Development gave a presentation on Blockchain at the Sabah State Agency Chief Information Officers (CIO) Conference in Kota Kinabalu which was attended by 250 people on July 25th.

Spain

• CEO Miguel Caballero from the Tutellus project joined David Garcia from the NEM Foundation on a Meetup on July 26th at the Barcelona Blockchain at Utopicus coworking space. David talked about developing applications on NEM from the developer’s point of view as well as highlighted new Catapult features, and best practices for designing and developing on NEM. Miguel discussed why Tutellus moved from Ethereum over to NEM.

South Korea

• NEM has made some significant moves in South Korea in recent months since its involvement in FutureBlock, a blockchain event organized by the Asia Leadership Conference (ALC).
• Leroy Mah, Interim NEM Korea Head and Sungjae Hwang, the CEO of Foundation X, signed a MoU with Foundation X, a blockchain accelerator based in South Korea. Foundation X will partner with NEM on the co-development of blockchain accelerator programs, provide blockchain education through the Blockchain Business Study Group program as well as run Hackathons and blockchain boot camps with South Korean Education institutions.
• Another MoU was signed with Incublock, a blockchain consulting firm, and lab, in South Korea. NEM and Incublock will work together on education programs. NEM will be an advisor for their accelerator programs and portfolio companies. As part of the partnership, NEM will also be setting up its NEM Satellite Hub for South Korea at Incublock’s premise where future meetups and developer training can take place as the premise has its own events hall and training rooms.

Thailand

• Laura Tanaka, Thailand Country Lead, is speaking at the Hybrid Summit in Bangkok on July 28-29 alongside NEM Advisor, Jeff McDonald, and Vietnam Lead, Kimble Ngo.
• Laura, Jeff, and Kimble also met with Taiwan Lead, Flora Fang, regarding future NEM planning efforts.