Fremont, Calif. :  The OpenFog Consortium announced that R3 Communications (R3Coms) is the winner of this year’s Fog Tank award, which recognizes the most innovative startup in fog computing. The Fog Tank competition was recently held at Fog World Congress 2018, an annual event produced by the OpenFog Consortium in collaboration with IEEE Communications Society.

The Fog Tank competition showcased leading innovators in fog technologies and applications as they took center stage to demonstrate their innovations to a panel of judges comprised of investors and VCs. The judges awarded early stage start-up R3Coms for its EchoRingTM wireless communication software, designed for applications that require time-critical, robust performance.

As this year’s winner of Fog Tank, R3Coms’ technology was recognized for its potential to become a game-changer in industrial communications and earned the grand prize of $25,000.

“We’re honored to be recognized by OpenFog, our peers and some of the most influential tech-centric VCs in the world,” said R3Coms’ Founder and Managing Director Florian Bonanati. “We’re very excited about our EchoRing industrial automation software and its use of fog computing to transform commercial off-the-shelf wireless modules into highly reliable, real-time wireless communication systems for industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 applications.”

Fog Tank is a graded competition where five finalists were each provided the opportunity to present their fog-related solutions and technologies on stage to a panel of tech-centric VCs. In addition to R3Coms, this year’s lineup included Ankalabs, Difuon, IoT Cloud and KidSense. Each startup had several minutes to concisely present its technology or solution and describe its business plan.

“This year’s Fog Tank competition was particularly exciting as companies demonstrated fog computing applied to edge analytics, deterministic wireless, de-centralized federated ephemeral edge computing, edge/fog/cloud solutions that empower racing teams and voice AI solutions for children,” said Sam Bhattarai, master of ceremonies for the Fog Tank and Director of Technology & Business Enablement, Toshiba Digital Solutions Co. “These innovative, new technologies underscore the advances of fog computing and its ability to transform entire industries, while enabling digitally disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence, IoT and wireless.”

Fog World Congress features the largest gathering of AI, IoT and 5G industry leaders, technologists and researchers in the world with an interest in advancing fog computing.