mPowered | mPowered has been selected in the ALPHA startup in the upcoming Collision 2022 Conference (June 20-23, 2022) | Round 17

OceanDAO Round 17
#1

Project Name

mPowered

Project Category

Build & Integrate

Proposal Earmark

Outreach

Proposal Description

mPowered has been selected into the ALPHA startup program at Collision 2022, one of North America’s largest tech conference. In 2021, they hosted over 38,000 attendees from over 141 countries and had over 600 conference events. mPowered has been given an exhibition space and they will allow for our company branding and be featured on the main conference website and mobile app. This will give a lot of exposure to not just mPowered but also to Ocean Protocol and we would like to add the Ocean Protocol logo in all of our literature and banner stand. We would also like to list Ocean Protocol as a partner of mPowered on all of our marketing materials. The funds will be used for the following expenditures (these quotes are :

  1. Conference registration
  2. Banner stand x1
  3. Flyers using high quality paper x 250
  4. Vista Print Business cards x 250

Grant Deliverables

  1. Create a standup banner stand to promote mPowered’s vision and also highlight our strong relationship with Ocean Protocol
  2. Create flyers which can help promote the vision of mPowered and highlight our partnership with Ocean Protocol
  3. Connect with Monica from Ocean Protocol re: branding guidelines for the Ocean Protocol digital assets. We can also distribute Ocean specific branding/marketing materials during the conference

Project Description

Make data a common good.

Final Product

  1. Contribute and promote the Ocean ecosystem.

Value Add Criteria

In 2021, Collision had over 38,000 attendees from over 141 countries and had over 600 conference events and is considered North America's largest tech events and the exposure that it will bring to the Ocean Protocol Community will be very significant since there will be a lot of foot and web traffic. In addition, we will have plenty of brand exposure because we will be listed in the main website under the ALPHA startup section and on the conference mobile app. We would also like to hand out any other promotional material given to us by Ocean Protocol during the conference to make the attendees aware of the great tech stack being built by Ocean.

Core Team

We are the team behind Transport Genie, an award winning IoT company that has created bespoke sensors from scratch that monitors local environmental conditions as livestock are in transit. We have pivoted to mPowered because we have seen the vast potential of Ocean Protocol because of what they have been building.

Joel Sotomayor: Co-Founder of mPowered

A serial entrepreneur who has already exited 2 companies, owns multiple patents (in 10 countries), 2 trade-marks, and multiple innovation awards in Canada and Australia. When he isn’t writing code, he is often hanging out with his Uber smart GF or talking to Corrie. Like most developers, he likes predictable results, loves to study pattern-behaviours relationships, has lots of quirks and quarks, and enjoys music but has 2 left feet when he dances.

Corre Sloot: Co-Founder of mPowered

Senior Full-Stack developer and has been involved with Blockchain since 2009 (he was a Satoshi-Era miner). He has undergraduate degrees in Physics and Computer Science and Joel thinks he is one of the smartest guys that he has ever met. He also loves cURL.

Noah Redler, Vice President of mPowered

Noah is a season veteran and is a technology futurists. He is helping us become “investment ready” and is helping out with Business Development and Investor relations.

mPowered IP Portfolio

United States Patent and Trademark Office

System and Method for Secure Data Messaging using a quantum proof encryption method for IoT devices within low bandwidth spectrum.

Patent number: Pending (US 63/227,627)

Canadian Intellectual Property Office

Data envelop™ is a trademark which we have registered with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office to describe how we send data securely from devices.

Trademark number: 2025085.

Advisors

Currently no advisors

Funding Requested
2500

Minimum Funding Requested
1500

Wallet Address
0xF49A4ba03f69eEf2366303e64Fc7b3a33d3f0043

3 Likes
#2

Hi there,

Thank you for applying to Round 17!

I am a Project-Guiding Member and have assigned myself to help you.

Your Grant Deliverables have been reviewed and look to be in good condition. I have also looked at your Project Standing, it looks to be in good condition and ready to apply for another grant.

Your proposal has been registered into the system and everything looks great!

I would like to thank you for your positive contributions to the Ocean Ecosystem and I look forward to reviewing future proposals from your project.

All the best!

-Christian Casazza

#3

Christian,

OK, thanks for the note. We are super excited about being part of Collision 2022 and we think that it will bring a lot of exposure to the ecosystem.

mPowered

1 Like
#4

just a follow up, Collision was great and we met with many AI companies and we have just came back from another successful business trip to Mexico where we got a lot of traction and potential customers. Our customer pipeline continues to grow!

#5

Collision is a huge event in Canada and brings a lot of VCs/builders and industry leaders together. A lot of deals get signed there, and a big cohort of tech companies from Vancouver usually attend.

Awesome to see that @mPowered was there, and am excited to hear that the biz dev in Mexico went well.

Just as a note from someone who really likes mPowered,

  1. I would love to see a bit more visibility into how the customer pipeline is growing, and leading to data assets, data consume, and other key metrics inside of Ocean Marketplace or otherwise. Outreach is great! Outreach w/ pipeline + conversions is even better! Seeing the latter laid out would make it dead easy for me to vote and support.

  2. mPowered is asking very little compared to many other outreach programs, and this is a tech-heavy organization that uses Ocean Protocol as part of their core technology stack. Depending on the structure, I would be happy to support larger efforts.

  3. I would remove the 1500 minimum and restructure how funding is leading to outcomes so that we can more easily provide support. There is already a lot of outreach and biz dev work taking place, I would love to see grants working like a subsidy, rather than a gating mechanism.

All the best!

#6

Hey,

thanks for the support. How would like us to show more visibility in our customer pipeline? As you may know, we only have developers on our team and we don’t really do that much social media activity because we have been too focused on growing our company. Last year we tried to find someone from the Ocean Community to be our marketing person but no one applied, so if you can help us find a marketing person that would be great.

Here is a great article written about us in BetaKit (BetaKit is an online media company that is solely focused on Canadian start ups) and to get this kind of coverage shows you our traction. here is the link to the article: mPowered partners with Ocean Set to build blockchain-powered ocean data marketplace. mPowered has partnered with Ocean Set to build a specific marketplace for Canada’s Blue Economy. It’s part of the Super Cluster program that the Federal Government of Canada has invested into. Overall, the Canadian government is spending $950 million on various Innovation Superclusters Initiatives.

In addition, while mPowered is a for profit company we have only done only open source projects in the OCEANDAO. I am very proud of this accomplishment and we have helped many companies in the Ocean Ecosystem and they have become customers of ours.

We welcome any help in terms of advice and we are also planning to apply to the shipyard program. We are also planning our European Tour to visit all of the teams that we have talked to over the past 2 years. Both mPowered and Transport Genie has experienced tremendous growth and we owe a lot of our success to to Ocean’s Core Tech. It has really helped us hyper accelerate and this has led to record revenues while maintaining a clean CAP table with no outside investment. All of the investment has come from the revenues that we have generated.

While I am here, I would also like to thank of all the teams that we have talked to over the past few years. It’s been great and there are many great teams out there building away and we would also like to acknowledge them. There are too many to list but you know who you are! Keep it up and thanks for inspiring us as well.

mPowered

2 Likes
#7

As a preface, I have spoken with the mPowered team in the past, and really love all the incredible work they are doing.

The statements I made above and in this post are pretty general and very personal. It can apply to anyone who is building business pipelines and is interested in making voting a much simpler process.

How would like us to show more visibility in our customer pipeline?

A very simple example of what I mean, would be a spreadsheet with the pipeline (input, processes, output), customers, and how far they are along.

Screenshot from 2022-07-10 12-53-43
Screenshot from 2022-07-10 12-53-431618×230 28.9 KB

Seeing something like this, growing over the time, and perhaps alluding to how funding (i.e. outreach) is leading to outcomes (i.e. data assets published), or more generally, how the business is growing.

It has really helped us hyper accelerate and this has led to record revenues while maintaining a clean CAP table with no outside investment. All of the investment has come from the revenues that we have generated.

This is an example that if I had visibility into, would greatly increase my engagement and confidence as a voter.

Information could therefore be public, with more sensitive information being redacted (example: customer name).

All the best mPowered team! Keep up the great work!

#8

These are great ideas but the application form from the DAO proposal doesn’t currently support this so I would like to suggest creating a mechanism where “seasoned” teams can have the ability to show their traction to the Ocean community. I think the Ocean Pearl team would be a great fit to create a new feature like this. I don’t them personally but we big fans of their work. A starting point might be a Town hall discussion and then circle back with the Ocean Pearl team?

1 Like