By Staff Writer
MASERU — The Computer Programming challenge organised by the National University of Lesotho (NUL), Science and Tech Society in partnership with Vodacom and Techware, ended on a very high note on Sunday , with the two sponsors crowning four winning ideas built by participants in just under 24 hours.
The hackathon was an initiative by the NUL group and Vodacom Lesotho Foundation, which sought to not only promote the culture of technology development in Lesotho, but also build implementable technology solutions to address some of the key challenges to Lesotho’s development.
The prizes won at the event were sponsored by Techware in the form of vouchers for the winners purchase gadgets from the company amounting to the amounts won.
In his closing remarks at the ceremony, head of the Vodacom Foundation, Mpho Brown, expressed gratitude to the NUL group that first approached Vodacom with the idea, and Techware for being so instrumental as a co-sponsor to make the event a success.
Brown said: “This is only the beginning of many events like this to come from us. We hope that these partnerships formed with NUL and Techware will continue to grow and work towards similar, but much bigger events of this nature, to really move the needle on technology-adoption in Lesotho, which is a key driver of economic development.”
The first prize at the contest went to Setsoto Boleme and his Mashupz team.
The group built a location-based application that can be used for a variety of emergency services such as integrating real-time emergency triggers and responses across different service-providers, as well as Google maps geo-tagging to guide the responder to where emergency help is needed.
Speaking on their creation, the Mashupz team stated: “This system can be used for all sorts of emergency services’ needs, from electricity outages, water pipe bursts, medical emergencies, and crime prevention.”
The system will be all the more useful in Lesotho where structured and named streets are few and far between.
Instead of emergency responders relying on vague directions provided by those in distress, they would instantly have a map on their end showing the shortest possible route to where the help is needed.
“Some of the ideas that we saw here today have been extremely revolutionary, and even all the more impressive because they were built in less than 24 hours,” said Johnny Dos Santos, Vodacom’s Executive Head of Commercial, who was a judge at the competition.
Techware’s Managing Director, Nhlapho Shatu, in his closing remarks, urged all the participants, especially those who did not walk away with any prizes, not to be discouraged and to keep pursuing their ideas, and ultimately build technology companies that can rival international giants such as Google and Facebook.
Other ideas that won the day included systems such as ‘iFind’— a windows application that tracks stolen laptops where there are WiFi access points using their media access control address when it connects to any access point.
Another winner was a Vodacom-centric “My M-Pesa” mobile application that re-implements the existing Vodacom M-Pesa system in a user-friendly and convenient manner.
All of the functionalities of M-Pesa are included but in a more efficient, “nicer-looking” way, with a host of extra additions for convenience, security, speed and simplicity.
