Nokia has entered into a collaborative partnership with Entrepreneur First, the London-based tech start-up accelerator.
Nokia will sponsor the organisation, providing resources to Entrepreneur First’s cohort of young innovators. The goal is to inspire them to build new businesses, especially ones founded on the core design, architecture and functionality of Nokia’s career services app, JobLens.
JobLens is a new app developed by Nokia and available now in the UK, US and Canada exclusively for Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 8, 7.5 and 7.8 devices. It uses Augmented Reality technology to visually render job vacancy data into a cityscape map through Nokia’s HERE mapping technology to provide a panorama of available employment across a city or town.
Job seekers can instantly see exactly where open positions are located, and filter them to match relevant experience or qualifications to an employer’s requirements. With social network integration across LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live, users can also seamlessly connect to their contacts and take action as they identify local job opportunities.
The partnership will also see the launch a contest for UK universities that will award prize money to breakthrough ideas for adapting JobLens. With its emphasis on evolving JobLens into all-new applications, the partnership hopes to launch new companies that themselves result in hiring new workers, as well as products that tackle the issue of unemployment. 
The partnership kicks off with today’s Entrepreneur First Innovation Day, which will be kicked off by Vince Cable, MP, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Mark Boleat, Chair of Policy and Resources at the City of London Corporation, and executives from Entrepreneur First and Nokia.
Nokia will then give a detailed overview of the JobLens app to the 30 members of the cohort. The cohort will also meet with representatives from government, education and employment services so they can learn what challenges these constituencies face and how an app can help them achieve their missions.
“Through the Entrepreneur First Cohort, Nokia is honoured and excited to engage some of the most innovative and agile minds in the UK,” said Bryan Biniak, VP & general manager, global partner & app development at Nokia. “We want to challenge these young minds to imagine how JobLens can be enhanced and refined to address UK unemployment.”
Entrepreneur First is a not-for-profit programme that launched in 2012, backed by Silicon Valley Bank, Microsoft, BSkyB, McKinsey & Company, Experian, the City of London Corporation, and Osborne Clarke. The programme aims to make high-growth entrepreneurship a viable career choice for talented graduates, by offering training and mentoring, as well as access to a network of leading entrepreneurs and investors. The 2012 cohort has graduated and raised a combined £15m in seed funding. Entrepreneur First is already the UK’s second largest recruiter of Cambridge Computer Scientists.
