New Kind of Network (NKN), a connectivity protocol & ecosystem powered by blockchain has announced that it was a finalist at Nokia’s Open Innovation Challenge.

The Nokia Open Innovation Challenge sought to find “new innovative products and solutions with a potential to work with Nokia to create joint solutions.”

Nokia chose NKN as one of six finalists out of three hundred applicants. Out of the six finalists, the platform was the only blockchain technology company and was also the youngest with less than eleven months of operation.

The team also received five one-on-one hour-long business and technical discussions from Nokia executives who served as mentors at the event.

NKN passed two different assessment rounds, with the first being filtered through 300 applicants down to a shortlist of 25, and then again to the second round where the Nokia jury selected the top six finalists.

The event concluded with a pitch to the event’s executive jury that was chaired by Nokia CTO and Bell Labs president, Marcus Weldon.  The final ceremony was held at the headquarters of Nokia Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J.

NKN described Nokia Bell Labs as “one of the pre-eminent global research organizations today, with a rich history of solving the great challenges facing the information and communications industry and ‘inventing the future.’”

Nokia Bell Labs has prominent researchers including fourteen who shared seven Nobel prizes for physics and one Nobel prize for chemistry. Membership includes Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson for developing the UNIX operating system, as well as Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of the C++ programming language.

NKN’s submission at the event was a demo of its public TestNet as applications running on it: the D-Chat Messenger and Space Cats 3D action game.

NKN TestNet v0.3 Lemur

NKN’s Lemur release was announced at the start of September this year and grew the number of maximum nodes in its network to over one thousand.

Lemur also introduced numerous other features to its ecosystem, including consensus and mining mechanisms, as well as an SDK and wallet to streamline the development of dApps on the NKN network.

The D-Chat Messenger is a decentralized messaging service built on the NKN blockchain. It claims to have taken just three days to develop with help from the Bluezelle, Nokia Network, and Portal Networks.

Space Cats is another application developed by NKN and was unveiled at the Serial Hacking hackathon that took place in September this year, of which the game was awarded first place in the competition.

NKN’s platform claims to have a unique advantage for gaming on the blockchain, claiming the report: “Only NKN provides an incentivized resistance-free network layer, making games with realtime multiplayer possible on blockchain.”

Space Cats can support up to eight players per game and currently has two gameplay modes: team deathmatch and capture the flag. The game also includes scores, leaderboards, and player customization of their tanks and abilities.

The Space Cats demo was released for Windows and Mac OS and comes bundled with several features.

During gameplay, one player takes on the role of the server, while others act as clients. Additionally, the game makes uses of a name service that aims to reduce the complications of using public keys. Instead, with the name service, a readable name is given to the player, making identifying players an easier task in-game.

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