ROUND UP | Innovate UK’s Global Business Accelerator Programme, new exchanges and team growth

The highlights from DOVU from the last few weeks, including new announcements and a round up of goings on.

Government missions to Korea and China, three new recruits, listing on two new exchanges, some exciting partnerships and very productive events — we’ve been quite busy.

What we did in Seoul

DOVU founders Irfon and Krasina recently spent a week in Seoul, South Korea as part of Innovate UK’s Global Business Accelerator Programme, delivered by the Enterprise Europe Network. This was an organised technology visit for businesses focused on developing IOT technologies. Along with the other selected companies, we were given the opportunity to visit centres of excellence and key innovation hubs and meet South Korean companies with the aim of developing strong international partnerships for future collaboration.

It was an intense 6 day agenda, packed with many meetings and interesting new ideas. We enjoyed our visit to the British Embassy where we had an overview from a Korean Trade Ministry representative about potential partnerships within the smart city initiative being developed in Seoul. Aiming to be the first to utilise 5G within their mobility system, we envision a great deal of opportunity for DOVU to work with Korean smart cities.

At Samsung HQ we met with Samsung Investments Teams and a topic that was of particular interest to us was a conversation about their recent acquisition of Harman and their work on the connected car space. Find out more here.

We also attended the Upbit Developer Conference which was fantastic and full of deep technical talks. It’s clear that the industry is trying to solve the issues with Ethereum network and working hard on providing alternative solutions that could help their products develop. Another big topic at the conference was security tokens, regulation and where the market is heading.

Product update

Development of the wallet is progressing at pace. The team are all running latest builds on their personal devices and hammering out bugs with a simple reward collection mechanism as we move towards a public release. Android is proving to be a little more complex to support with such a wide variety of devices and OS versions, but the majority of major issues are now in hand.

Subsequent to the wallet we’re also building out a management dashboard to manage and handle token import/export which is also currently in testing.

Discussions are happening internally as to how we roll out the public release, and new hire Melissa (see more below) is leading on that strategy. We’ll keep the community posted on plans as they are finalised.

Team growth

We’re delighted to have hired three more talented people to join the DOVU team.

Melissa Tate has joined DOVU as our new Head of Commercial. Melissa has an MBA from IE Business School and several years of experience at the intersection of sales, product and marketing. She helped US edtech company Apex Learning scale up its sales team, revamp its positioning and launch its flagship tutorials product. She then moved into product marketing consulting and found her passion working with early stage companies to assess markets, identify targets, and find product-market fit. Melissa is currently collaborating with the team to get the new consumer wallet ready for launch. She is excited to help build the value of the DOVU ecosystem and token.

Nishant Modi joins our tech team as Senior Mobile Developer and is based in India. He likes to work with emerging technology like blockchain and cryptocurrency and has worked on a variety of challenging projects over the years. Nish specialises in iOs, Android, PHP and React Native.

Amy Bratchie-Watkins is undertaking a marketing apprenticeship at DOVU and will be supporting our online marketing activities as well as events.

We’re continuing to grow our team and currently seeking more developers to join us in building and maintaining our tech. Full details and application process here. Please do share these opportunities with your network!

Exchanges, partnerships & opportunities

DOV on more exchanges

The DOV token is now live on two new exchanges — Livecoin and Latoken. So, while you’re waiting for the ability to earn tokens through our wallet, you can get a head start and access DOV right now. We’re also listed on HitBTC, EtherDelta, IDEX and Radar Relay.

Partnership with XYO

We’re thrilled to be working with XYO — a decentralized location network that aims to become the main source of information for location data. One of the most important factors for the application of the DOVU wallet is proof of location. Where exactly are our users? How do we prove this to our third party partners? Read more about this new partnership here and check out the short video from Irfon Watkins.

SMMT Future Mobility Challenge

The Future Mobility Challenge is a new initiative from SMMT, which will create new partnerships, investments and acquisitions between the world’s leading automotive brands (BMW, Jaguar Land Rover, Bosch, Ford and Toyota) and innovative technology start-ups and SMEs. DOVU has been shortlisted to pitch in London on 17 October — we will let you know how it goes!

2030 Mobility Innovation Challenge by KPMG & Matchi

Powered by Matchi; KPMG has launched the Mobility 2030 Innovation Challenge that aims to identify and empower emerging tech companies that are actively changing the future of mobility ecosystem. All successful entries are showcased in a central KPMG Mobility database to be shared with forward-thinking clients and partners worldwide. We’re delighted that DOVU’s solution has been validated by KPMG and Matchi analysts and added to the Matchi portal.

Events: past & upcoming

MOBI connect

DOVU along with other stakeholders from OEM’s, insurance firms and technology partners contributed to a full day workshop in London last week mapping out how Usage Based Insurance can be managed and facilitated through tokenisation and various uses of blockchain. A lot of great progress was made, and the opportunities are both clear and exciting, as well as much needed to enable broader adoption of UBI as a future facing method of insuring vehicles.

IAFN panel

Also in London last week, our head of product Alex Morris sat on a panel with the CEO of MOBI — Chris Ballinger discussing how blockchain can influence financial services for the automotive trade. The discussion was targeted at people relatively new to blockchain and we hopefully helped illustrate some of the benefits and efficiencies both blockchain and tokenisation will bring to established industries like finance and leasing.

Future Cities Mission

We are delighted to have been chosen to participate in Innovate UK’s Future Cities Mission to China in November, giving DOVU the opportunity to meet and pitch to prospective partners, investors & customers as well as visit local pioneering future cities projects.

Blockchain Live

Krasina Mileva, COO & Co-Founder joined a panel discussion at Blockchain Live, held in London on 25 September. The discussion centred around how blockchain and other emerging technology can help in uniting transport and logistics.

Irfon took part in a DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) and Blockchain workshop near Cologne organised by the University of St Gallen where we discussed decentralised platforms and business model implementation.

Thanks for reading our pretty long update this month. As always, we will bring you big news as it happens and everything else will be covered in the October update.