Meet Hoken Tech, Winner of the Startups of the Year in Bari

This interview series celebrates all the phenomenal Startups of the Year Winners. Congratulations! Well-Deserved, Champion.The HackerNoon community is excited to learn more about you!

What does it mean for you to win this title?

As a little team from Italy, being recognized abroad is very challenging, but it demonstrates that our team, little by little, is expanding beyond the national border and gaining more traction thanks also to this little reward that we achieved.

P.S. We arrived in 3rd position in all of Europe, so we are the 3rd best startup in Europe. Wow!

What sets you apart from the competition?

Our business is in the blockchain and NFT field, but where the competition can create standard NFTs and collections, our team made a lot of R&D and achieved something great from physical NFTs to the first portable NFT distributor to web3 blockchain videogame, like the first blockchain NFT videogame for GameBoy.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We have a small team, and this is the key to developing new products and elaborating fast strategies to test and implement new technology that lets our startup move fast and integrate new software and platforms to speed up some processes or to automate others in more we have a great CTO that can master several fields in the dev sector so sometimes we create or integrate some external APIs to our systems.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

It is difficult to say because our team already has great experience in different fields, and we decided to bring them together under our startup instead of working for other companies that would launch or offer products that we’ll end up developing for them in the future.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We are based in South Italy, and because we are in Europe, for us, the success is to make great products and services, trying to consume less energy and waste as possible, so to be aware of the amount of our progress, we monitor daily our CO2 emissions, so we compare year after year our impact on the environment, and every year we release a report where there is all the key metric that is worth to track:

Tell us how your startup is changing the world.

Our focus is to give the best and most advanced tool available in the blockchain space to small and medium businesses because, especially in South Italy, they are often left behind due to a lack of knowledge of the field or due to overpriced solutions that are why we bring the same technology used by big companies, to small and medium companies, at a fair price.

How do you or your company intend to embrace the responsibility of this title in 2024?

In our case, the challenge that we want to face is to bring our little startup to become in the future a B Corporation, and so far, we have achieved little improvement so far, reaching a score of 35, not enough to be a B Corp, but we are more ahead of other companies, so we want to increase that number in this 2024:

What goals are you looking forward to accomplishing in 2024?

We want to create more games this year in the blockchain space and also try to lend to some major video game stores to reach more users. This a very challenging task because not all stores let devs bring blockchain videogame, so we are working to make our game fit in some videogame stores and let them know that the next generation of videogames are web3 videogames, where users own their items and progress, without the risk to shut down the server in the feature, because the server is on the blockchain!

Which trend(s) are you most excited about in 2024? Share your reasons.

Certainly, the one linked to artificial intelligence because there are every day a new tool or a new platform that automate or make easier a task that in the past where needed a person to make it possible, and in our case, we are testing and integrating some tools that are just perfect for small startups like us (have You tried Mockey?)

2023 had been another crazy year, especially in tech, with layoffs and the Generative AI takeover! Which trend are you most concerned about? Be as brief or as detailed as you like.

In the future, this technology will progress without any problems and will be more accessible to more people; these people will use it in an improper way to create content, photos, and videos without the right permission to do so, especially in the deep fake field, where by now the voice cloning tool is evolving at high speed, and after that, the face cloning will be as simple as going on a bicycle.

Share your biggest success so far and/or your biggest failure so far.

One of the great achievements we have made so far is to create a blockchain NFT game for the iconic Gameboy from Nintendo, where not only we developed a game, but in more, we inserted an NFT so when completing the game, You receive an NFT, where You can store or sell on a public NFT marketplace, everything made possible using the EOS blockchain (You can play for free on Itch):

We would love your feedback on HackerNoon as a tech publication! How has your experience been with us?

With the team of HackerNoon, we have a special feeling because even though they started as little as us, they are now one of the best platforms to know everything in the tech field, with detailed guides in different sectors, from AI to blockchain and they even made a little documentary about crypto and blockchain.

Any words of wisdom you’d like to share with us?

There is incredible strength in being constant in the most difficult challenges. Like the sea that continues to crash against the rocks, never give up, because it is precisely in those moments of struggle and perseverance that the most extraordinary success stories are shaped.