UTECH students win Caribbean CODESprint.... The event, which was a collaboration with StartUp Jamaica, was held at the Musson Foundation e-Learning Lounge in Kingston and had five Jamaican teams along with three virtual teams

Sunday, May 31, 2015    

A group of third year students from the University of Technology Jamaica (UTech), won the Caribbean Mobile Innovation (CMIP) challenge and CodeSprint for designing a tourism-based mobile application, called iTechHotel, in just 24-hours.

World Bank ICT Consultant Ayanna Samuels (left) hands the
 prize envelope to Avryl Francis of Team UTech, which designed
the tourism app iTechHotel in 24-hours at the CMIP/Start-Up
Jamaica Challenge and CodeSprint held in Kingston over
the Labour Day weekend. Her teammates, Che- Andre Gordon
(2nd right) and Rasheed Andrews, are pleased to share
 in the winning moment.

iTechHotel allows hotel guests to check themselves in and order services from the convenience of their mobile phones while staying at the hotel. For their efforts, the group -- comprising Avryl Francis, Che-Andre Gordon and Rasheed Andrews -- bagged an automatic entry to the World Bank-funded CMIP PitchIT Caribbean business pitch.

The event, which was a collaboration with StartUp Jamaica, was held at the Musson Foundation e-Learning Lounge in Kingston and had five Jamaican teams along with three virtual teams, one each from Barbados, Dominica and St Kitts & Nevis, hacking out mobile applications to solve problems in agriculture, energy management and tourism.

"This was a tremendous success," declared Robert Whitehorne, project manager for CMIP.

"For the first time in recent stagings of hackathons we're able to have teams from other countries -- namely Barbados, Dominica and St Kitts & Nevis -- participate in real-time, tackling the same challenges of those in Jamaica. In the end, they made their presentations via video conferencing and proposed some compelling solutions," he added.

Second place went to another UTech Team comprising Stephan Smith, Rickardo Hyde, Brian Thompson and Mikhail Grant, which proposed MobiCrop, an agri-based app that would allow farmers to predict weather conditions and plant appropriate crops in season.

JPSGo was the name of the app presented by Steam Team -- a group from UWI -- which secured third place. The app is designed to allow JPS's prepaid customers to pre-purchase power based on a menu which predicts the usage demand of the appliances in their homes.

The team from St Kitts & Nevis, led by ICT professional Telojo Onu, proposed Nuh TekkUp -- an app for farmers to report praedial larceny in real time. They were the the Top Virtual team. more