It's often the case that ecosystems are more important than technical product specs so here it is, an exploration of NEM ecosystem in a second part of my research of NEM token.

Part 1: NEM consensus algorithm and blockchain features.

Historical evolution

NEM was born in January 2014. The project was announced on the Bitcointalk.org forum by the utopianfuture (he is still unknown), who wanted to do a fork of NXT.
On May 30, 2014 the NEM stakes was put onto the NXT exchange. Initially, 1 NEM stake represented 1 million NEM coins.
On June 5, 2014 a first project roadmap was published. It was presented by NEM lead developer Jaguar0625.
On June 13, 2014, utopianfuture vanished from NEM ecosystem. Some of the details of utopianfuture leaving NEM were described in this medium post (bias and objectivity levels unknown).
NEM alpha version was released on June 25, 2014, the wallet was released on July 17.
Beta production version was released in October 2014.
First stable release version appeared on March 31, 2015.

Partnerships

NEM has strong connections with Dragonfly Fintech and Tech Bureau. Both companies intergrated NEM software in their products. NEM developers and Mijin developers are mostly the same people.

Mijin is a private blockchain solution that uses NEM software. It was tested by many Asia institutions, especially by Japan's largest trust bank, SBI Sumishin Net Bank.

Tech Bureau is the crypto-fintech company, which develops software and services based on blockchain technology and cryptocurrency technology. Also, as a founding member of “BCCC”, Japan’s largest blockchain business organization, it is also currently working on popularization of blockchain technology. Tech Bureau developed Mijin using NEM technology. Tech Bureau also runs Zaif, a cryptocurrency exchange, Zaif (http://zaif.jp).

To put things better into perspective, the focus of the partnership is to develop a blockchain engine, codenamed as Catapult, which is meant to be an augmented and newly amended version of the Mijin platform.Source: The Merkle

Dragonfly is a blockchain platform solution provider for a large part of the financial ecosystem, including for payment, clearing, and settlement sector. The founder and CEO is Lon Wong. Lon Wong also is a member of NEM core team and a president of NEM.io Foundation.

"We have been ahead of the pack and painstakingly designed this solution for the last three years. With a proven solution, we are able to demonstrate a world’s first in setting the standards right, i.e., establish one’s autonomous private chain and then integrate with the larger, massive network of financial institutions, transacting potentially hundreds of thousands of Tx/s at the system level, all on the blockchain while maintaining independence. This remittance service is only one part of a spectrum of solutions Dragonfly is providing, which includes enabling a country to issue its own sovereign digital money", - Dragonfly Fintech CEO Lon Wong

NEM.io Foundation Ltd

NEM foundation was announced on July 2, 2016.

NEM’s legal entity shall be a not-for-profit entity and should be free from political tussles. That is ideal, but NEM shall also need to be sustainable in the long run.
Source: NEM Blog

The primary declared purposes of the organization are to promote NEM and build partnerships.

On March 5, 2017 there was a first Annual General Meeting of the foundation with Lon Wong as a president of the foundation.

The Malaysian NEM Association

The Malaysian NEM Association is a non-profit society that is registered with the Malaysian Registry of Societies (“ROS”). Its declared aim is to promote blockchain and NEM in Malaysia. The organization collaborates with different youth and educational institutions, governments organization.

The Malaysian NEM Association was started in late 2016, and since then, a lot happened. We're not 100% satisfied in which with the speed things are moving, but I guess that's natural in our field. Well, and we're learning how to run as an association as we are going.
Source: NEM Association (Malaysia) Blog

Media

NEM subreddit exhibits a moderate amount of activity and a significant increase of new users during several last months.

The all time top post on the NEM subreddit is Is NEM REALLY the sleeping giant? by Steem author Hive account@vincent4384.

Ecosystem nodes

Supernodes

The NEM Supernode's program is a incentive program to encourage people to support NEM network. It was established on June, 1, 2016.

This program is funded with XEM (NEM tokens) set aside during the Nemesis(Genesis) block. This rewards are given to the high perfomance nodes that provide support for light wallets, mobile wallets and 3rd party apps. To become a Supernode a node must pass a number of tests and show an acceptable level of perfomance for the following metrics: bandwidth, chain height, chain parts, computing power, version, ping, responsiveness.

The NEM Supernode's program is funded with more than 21 million XEM (set aside in the Supernode's Fund11 and explained in the NEM Development Contract), the daily reward was set at 70,000 XEM. This payment is divided among the all participating Supernodes.