Kameir

Telenor Group – a Norwegian mostly government-owned multinational telecommunications company headquartered near Oslo –  is one of the world’s largest mobile telecommunications companies with operations in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Asia. It owns extensive broadband and TV distribution operations in four Nordic countries, and a 10-year-old research and business line for Machine-to-Machine technology. Telenor owns networks in 13 countries, and has operations in 29 countries.A product within telecommunications giant Telenor is hoping the technology behind initial coin offerings (ICOs) can help it disrupt the media business model.

Central to the Norway-based firm’s exploration of the Blockchain technology is its partnership with startup Hubii, which launched an ICO. Both companies believe the project will bring benefits by providing a way to create a decentralized, autonomous marketplace of content that can be sold across different platforms, as well as helping Telenor defend against its hacking problem.

The firms are also interested in how they could directly interact using smart contracts powered by ethereum, instead of via the pesky media companies now increasingly viewed as middlemen.

Telenor’s global partnership director, Ketil Hoigaard, described how a number of early-stage blockchain operations being conducted by his firm around the world could stand to benefit from lessons learned from the Hubii Network ICO. Hoigaard said:

“Using technologies like blockchain to deliver these services is [the] key to succeed, to be honest, because I think [blockchain is] what’s coming to all these verticals as a tool, a platform, to help deliver content to the end users in an easy way across borders.”