An all girls team made of two BBIT fourth year students – Lilian Nduati and Linda Kwamboka, and two alumni - Jamila Abass and Susan Eve Oguya and Catherine Kiguru a developer in Tracom , won the top prize of Kshs 1 million in the inaugural IPO48 software application development competition hosted by SEP (Strathmore Enterprise Program) at the University from 29th to 31st October. The four are members of AkiraChix a group of geek girls.
The winning team developed an application dubbed M-Farm - an information service that focuses on delivering real time information to farmers on current market prices of their products. It also aims to bring farmers together in a collaborative forum.
Essentially, the M-Farm service will help small-scale farmers get price information that will help them know where to get the best deal for their products through their mobile phones. It fills an information gap currently used by middlemen to the detriment of the farmer.
The service will also provide farmers with weather alerts, connect with other farmers, find nearest farm stores and get help from farm experts. M-Farm has simple and easy to use features. It can be accessed in Kiswahili language and integrates an Interactive Voice Response (IVR).
IPO48 is a boot-camp style initiative whose aim is for developers to build new web and mobile services in 48 hours only! It was organized by HumanIPO and Garage48.org. It was the first time the competition was being held in Africa.
Blogger Moses Kemibaro wrote: “the IPO48 was a highly competitive and successful event with many great software applications and business concepts coming to the fore. Its amazing how much creativity and ingenuity was presented there and I found myself thinking more like a venture capitalist, rather than observer. One thing however is for sure – many of the ideas that did not win will still find suitors and in fact it was announced that one already had an Angel Investor in place!” See: http://www.moseskemibaro.com/2010/11/01/akirachix-win-kes-1-million-in-ipo48-with-m-farm/
For a full breakdown of the results, visit this post at Afrinnovator.com who also covered IPO48 in detail..
Adopted from Strathmore website.
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