The iHub recently hosted the Intel Shark tank, a session much like the Shark tank on US cable channel ABC together with Intel East Africa to bring together startups willing to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges and to a crowd of participants to get their idea validated and with the ultimate plan of getting their idea pushed to the next level by both the investors and the Intel team comprising of Agatha from SSG and Frederick, the top community developer evangelist for Intel in East Africa. the startups were meant to bring their A-Game as far as quality, creativity, and relevance was concerned. You can check out some of the comments on Twitter here.
There were some prizes and 3 out of 8 start-ups won the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, the Asus Fonepad and the Intel YOLO.
The presentations included:
- Jarida Kiosk – a solution that provides newspaper on mobile devices alleviating the cost that is incurred by companies that have to purchase newspapers everyday. The solution would work by digitizing all newspapers and providing them on tablets and hand held devices at a lower fee than the actual newspaper.
- Deck Music Mixer – a solution that uses a pair of DJ-like mixing decks mix, edit, add localized effects like the famous “ikibamba sana wapi nduru wewe!!” effect, and record sample mixes straight off the app and onto a phone’s memory.
- Tichaa – a kiddie solution that uses a puzzle to teach children Swahili by having them rearrange pieces of a puzzle to unlock new words or phrases in Swahili. This pitch was awarded 2nd runner up. Thirst Interactive, the team behind Tichaa, also won the recently concluded Safaricom AppWiz competition in which they won 1.5 Million Kenya Shillings. They have 1,000 downloads to date.
- Election Thief – A game that encourages users to try and find who is ‘stealing votes’ on the app. It was built to try and sensitize masses just before Kenya’s general elections earlier in 2013 on the vice that is quite common in Africa, the theft of election votes and rigging results. This pitch was awarded 1st runner up.
- MilePress – a solution that allows one to send (and see) messages shared in their vicinity. It is like Twitter only that it is location relevant and only bring what is relevant to you in your area. The audience at Intel Shark Tank seemed to like this start-up probably because it would help with the recent government directive dubbed, Nyumba Kumi, that seeks to make sure a group of about 10 households all know who lives there and what they do to reduce crime and increase community inter-dependance.
- Simiyu the Chicken – a game app with a total of 40 levels (and 5 power ups) that uses a chicken named Simiyu to collect coins and evade obstacles using directional keys. The application runs as both an Android app as well as a web app to cater to all audiences. It has 3 levels i.e. east, normal, and difficult, for a good split in challenge expectation. This solution won the grand prize, a 431,000 KES (5,000 USD) marketing kitty as well as a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3.
