It was a weekend of mixed grill – excitement, anxiety, confidence, uncertainty, hope and relief – all in a bid to create the winning ICT solutions using the Access Gap study data and other data sets.
The USPF Hackathon event kicked off at 1.00 p.m. on Friday, 18th September, 2015 with the accreditation of pre-registered participants. The USPF team, event managers and Coaches were on hand to ensure a hitch-free weekend of innovative creations.
Ideas were presented and those that met the published criteria were selected and subsequently subjected to a transparent voting process conducted by the participants. Thereafter, teams were formed to create the 15 successful solutions.
Within 48 hours, the teams, with encouragement from coaches, worked tirelessly to create working prototypes of their solutions that would impress the Judges and add sustainable value to the expansion of ICT to unserved and underserved areas of Nigeria.
Sunday evening marked the climax when 15 innovative solutions were pitched and the top five solutions were:
1. Datamart – A marketplace to buy and sell data with analytics
2. Farm Fresh – A USSD based e-commerce application for agricultural produce.
3. Social wifi – A wifi-based phone network
4. Prima Local – A mesh based network that uses whitespace to provide connectivity
5. Get-roid – Emergency system that uses power lines to transmit emergency signals from homes
The Judges had to select the three winning solutions. And the winners are……
1st prize of N1m – Datamart
2nd prize of N.75m – Farm Fresh
3rd prize of N.5m - Social Wi-Fi
The three solutions will undergo a three-month incubation programme to complete the prototypes and make ready for the market.