South African application developer AppCraft has won a Nokia Innovator award for its e-literacy cellphone application.
Held at Nokia World 2010, the company was announced victorious yesterday in the 'life improvement' category.
AppCraft's e-literacy app edged out competitors from Romania, Egypt and China with their apps ranging from a car black box to mobile baby care.
Simon Botes, founder of AppCraft, said in his blog that it's the second year AppCraft has made it into the finals. This year marks the first win for a local company. Botes says the development team, Barry Roodt and Nicola van Niekerk, “worked around the clock with me to create e-literacy”.
He explains that e-literacy is an easy-to-use mobile application free to download in the Nokia Ovi store. “The goal behind e-literacy is to provide free early education to millions of children and uneducated adults around the globe and it works using the touch interface on all S60 5th edition Nokia handsets.”
Botes says the application was created because AppCraft has one goal, which is free education for all. “To reach the next billion, education is vital,” he says, adding that education is the key to success. “E-literacy gives the basic building blocks of education at no cost.”
The e-literacy app, according to Botes, is designed to teach children, so the app is downloaded by an educated person and shared with an un-educated person and that is how the learning is facilitated.
Botes entered the Calling All Innovators Africa challenge because its Snake Guide, the world's first mobi-guide to snakes of SA, took fourth place on the African continent in 2009 and that was motivation enough.
“When we heard of the global 2010 challenge we could not resist stepping up and showing what was possible. The fact that Nokia has some great prizes also plays a huge role.
“We tried to enter the Bada development challenge,” Botes says. “Sadly, Samsung is not really serious about helping developers and could not meet any of its promises made in time for the contest and, needless to say we never had our app ready in time for the deadline of that contest.”
Botes notes that SA has some great talent, and a lot of that talent, he thinks, is wasted or not properly harnessed. “A South African app took first place at this year's contest,” he says. “I am sure you can see that we compare to our international friends.”
While the application was created for Nokia handsets, Botes says it will also be ported to other handsets.
As a company, AppCraft is a relatively new start-up focusing on free education applications.
Botes thinks mobile applications will evolve to meet the changing needs of mobile technology.
“Education, entertainment, business, finance and social services are the future of apps,” he says.
“Mobile payment will see a huge uptake in coming years and this will evolve much faster than most folks expect.”
The prize is $50 000 and other benefits, such as marketing and distribution of the application through Nokia's Ovi store.
Share