Samsung
Electronics Co., Ltd, in conjunction with iHub will for the second year sponsor
the Mobile Garage Students Exhibition; Hackathon for 200 programmers, computer
scientists, software engineers, and web developers drawn from universities and
colleges across the country. The winner of the Hackathon will win the best
mobile app prize, from Samsung Kenya.
This year’s hackathon will run under the theme "Solutions
for the Next Billion mobile users" and is organised by Akirachix’, a
women group that undertakes technology training. This event will provide a
platform for networking opportunities, coding practice, and competition for
young upcoming techies at the iHub Nairobi; an incubation space for tech
entrepreneurs.
“Apart from the hackathon, this will be a brilliant
learning opportunity for the participants, since it will incorporate a panel of
re-known entrepreneurs who will talk of their failure stories and lessons
learnt. This is a platform where the students can hear of the reality of
entrepreneurship and the challenges in the journey. They will have an
opportunity to ask the entrepreneurs how they overcame their challenges,” Said
Samsung Electronics East Africa HHP Business Leader, Manoj Changarampatt.
And added: At Samsung Electronics, we maintain a
policy geared at promoting mutual growth with our stakeholders through our
corporate vision of “Leading Digital Convergence Innovation”. This policy
particularly highlights the need to collaborate with progressive organisations
to promote mutual interests. Samsung will consider the winning Apps for listing
on the Samsung Apps store. However, such Apps would need to meet a global
audience threshold.This is the essence of our support to the annual Hackathon”.
Since
its founding in 2010, Akirachix has sought to bring women into technology by
collaborating with Nairobi high schools. They also teach courses in computers,
web design, programming, and entrepreneurship to girls from Kibera. Some of the
programme's graduates now work at tech start-ups and major mobile accounting
firm.
A
2010 Intermedia survey found that Kenyan women own and use mobile phones much
less than men, and have significantly less Internet access. Furthermore, few
women attend Hackathons or enrol in university tech programmes.
The
collaboration between Samsung and the industry stakeholders is, geared at
boosting local technology entrepreneurship prospects. Samsung Electronics East
Africa will continue providing support to local developers to enable them
commercially deploys their applications on the popular Android platform.
Our support will involve hosting commercially viable
applications covering a wide range of categories on the Samsung Apps Store,
which comes as a standard feature on all Samsung Smartphones. Apps offered for
sale at the Samsung Apps store are priced in the local currency concluded Ngeru
The Samsung App store, is accessed by millions of
mobile phone subscribers’ globally seeking to download quality android
applications in diverse categories such as Entertainment, Education, Games,
Lifestyle, Travel and Productivity among others. Kenyan Application developers
on the Android platform therefore, have equal access to other global developers
to showcase their solutions on the Samsung Apps store which is a gateway to
global tech-preneurship
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