Developers have began warming up to BlackBerry. So much that more than 60 developers on Wednesday 20th March 2013 attended a BlackBerry® Jam Session for Kenyan Universities at Nairobi-based Mocca Hotel. This event follows that series of BlackBerry Jam Sessions that were held in Africa in 2012 and around the world as well with the largest being in Amsterdam, Holland in Feb 2013. The African event did however attract over 300 developers in JHB – South Africa, Lagos – Nigeria and Nairobi Kenya last year.
The Jam Session was an intense 10 hour programming session where developers in groups of 2-4 worked on transforming a social or business idea into a working App. At the end of the session, developers presented their apps to a panel of judges for a chance to win a BlackBerry® PlayBook™. Participants came from the following universities:
- Inoorero
- Strathmore
- Jomo Kenyatta University
- Kenyatta University
- Mount Kenya University
All these participants are now expected to use the knowledge acquired from the hackathon to create BlackBerry 10 Apps. Remember the BlackBerry 10 commitment.
The winners were:
Salud (which is Spanish for “eat healthy”) won the Best Social app category. It was developed by students from Inoorero University. This is an App that seeks to promote healthy eating by allowing users to look up detailed nutritional information of the food they are about to consume like the calorie count, natural vs. artificial ingredient nature and health benefits associated with this food.
My Police won the Best Business app. It has been developed by students from the University of Nairobi. This app allows users to search for information on a policeman hence reducing the number of police imposters in the police force. Remember the Waiganjo Fake Cop saga in Kenya. It also eases identification of co-workers among security agents to reduce the number of imposters in the industry. More importantly though, the app enables citizen-policing where they can report criminal incidents to the nearest police station as well as log complaints against the police themselves.
