Team KOMODO, four students from the University of Cape Town, namely Richard Sadie, Pieter Roodt, Junaid Parker and Mohammed Irfaan Imamdin, has won the South African leg of the Imagine Cup, a Microsoft co-sponsored technology competition.
Team KOMODO was among the 40 teams that took place in this year's Imagine Cup South African leg of the competition. As part of their prize, they will be flying to New York, USA in June 2011 to participate in the worldwide Imagine Cup competition.
Now in its ninth year, the Imagine Cup challenges the world's best student programmers to create applications to solve real-world problems. More than 200 000 students from 100 countries entered the competition in 2009.
Their project, HAWK, is a crowd-sourced, collaborative information aggregation, reporting and geo-visualisation system geared towards community-centric disaster management and neighbourhood improvement.
“What inspired our project was watching informal relief efforts in disaster stricken countries, where Twitter and Skype were used within minutes of the disaster happening, to start co-ordinating people and relief efforts, and looking at the Ushandi model for citizen journalism in conflict areas, we recognised the enormous potential of allowing crowds, communities and neighbourhoods to become self-organising if they had an open, universally accessible, socially integrated, and intelligent platform to share on,” said team KOMODO.
“We are extremely excited to be going to New York next year as this will award us an opportunity to meet other competitors from around the world and see what projects they have and how different they are from ours. We are looking forward to being able to meet, discuss and network with the best and brightest of the world's Imagine Cup competitors. Most of all, representing South Africa's talent in New York will be a great milestone for our team,” said team KOMODO.
Clifford de Wit, Developer and Platform Lead at Microsoft South Africa, said choosing a winner for Imagine Cup is always challenging as year on year, the judges were amazed by the high calibre of the projects and the levels of innovation displayed.
“The software development industry is a fast-moving one. The creativity and innovation of this year's students gives an indication of how much great talent South Africa's young minds have to offer. These students are using software to make a real difference in people's lives and to the economy as a whole,” said De Wit.
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