F5.5G Leap-forward Development of Broadband in Africa The Africa Broadband Forum 2024 (BBAF 2024) was successfully held in Cape Town, South Africa recently, under…
Check out these 10 WDC startups pitching at PwC’s Vision to Reality Awards
PricewaterhouseCoopers’s (PwC) Vision to Reality programme in collaboration with Word Design Capital 2014 (WDC2014) will be hosting the seventh pitching session of WDC2014. Ten local startups — chosen for their “cutting-edge tech design, innovation, and social entrepreneurship” — will be pitch their ideas in effort to receive funding, mentorship and exposure on 23 July.
The agency of WDC2014, Cape Town Design NPC, will award R10 000 for the most impressive and deserving startup. Furthermore, in partnership with South African crowdfunding site, Thundafund, startups with active campaigns will have their first R10 000 milestone goals matched by Cape Town Design NPC.
The pitching session is part of a the Vision to Reailty’s mentorship programme which the winning startups stand a chance of joining. The programme also gives the winning startup team a chance to attend PwC’s International Conference which would be a great chance for entrepreneurs to network, gain exposure, and experience with the likes of investors and other important parties. The winning startups of PwC’s mentor programme will be announced in August.
“To realise the legacy ambitions of WDC we’d like to see as many of the recognized projects brought to fruition and growth,” says Nicky Swartz, programme director of Cape Town Design NPC. “These pitching sessions aim to showcase the projects and what they need in terms of funding, capacity and collaborations, whilst encouraging the public and business community to identify projects that they would like to support through both large investments and crowdfunding.”
The Integrated Sustainability Awareness System (SAS)
The Integrated Sustainability Awareness System (SAS) aims to bridge the gap between a household’s needs and existing systems for service delivery. It does so by collecting information from the consumer on a daily basis, compiling a database of statistics relating to energy efficiency and sustainability within the residential sector that does not exist at present.
The system provides users with real-time feedback that rates their carbon footprint. People are then encouraged with various rewards and discounts that they will qualify for, encouraging them to take initiative and become involved in improving their status.
Triage is the medical process of rapidly assessing and sorting patients according to severity of illness. The scoring process looks at clinical parameters of heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, temperature, neurological score and presenting symptom to classify patients into different acuity categories.
In order to decrease the time, accuracy and training required for the process, mTriage introduces a device that will combine the detection of the four clinical parameters and connect with a mobile computing device.
GoMetro is a solution to the question of how we capture, curate and improve the transport information available to residents of Cape Town – in order to make more informed decisions on how we use public transport in the City. The importance of the design solution on everyday life is that GoMetro has become essential to the poor of Cape Town accessing economic and educational opportunities. The solution is a mobile app and service that is free to use, and captures, manages and presents transport information for the rail network in Cape Town.
FutureTech 2014: Altered Realities
Renowned science and technology publication, Popular Mechanics, is aiming to identify and reward home-grown inventiveness. This is partly being done by hosting a series of precursor events at various venues across Cape Town under the banner of Altered Realities which will lead up to the FutureTech 2014 conference in November.
Online Activist is the 1st African WordPress plug-in for online activism, powered & developed by GivenGain in collaboration with WooThemes. GivenGain has developed an online tools that eases the process of raising funds and take action for the causes they believe in. This project’s aim is to create a small piece of technology that will give users a simple, yet powerful, tool to change the world around them. This technology will be created through the collaboration between these two globally recognised tech organisations.
This project aims to grow and design solutions for specific needs through dialogue and collaboration by exposing the ICT sector to challenges in education, health, sustainability, business and lifestyle. The project is aimed at software engineers — programmers, technology managers, designers and executives — who wish to build useful and important software solutions that will respond to some of our big challenges.
Global Design Competition – Future Tyger (Greater Tygerberg Partnership)
The Greater Tygerberg Partnership (GTP), proposes to bridge the divide between the City Bowl and Cape Town’s emerging second metropolitan centre in Tygerberg. To this effect the Future Tyger programme was crafted. This process involves different stages where dialogue is conducted, action planned, and finally, the Global Design Competition will be presented with the initiative’s processes and execution.
Aweza uses multi-lingual phrase and vocabulary translation with the primary aim to effectively break down language barriers in South Africa and encourage cross cultural engagement through leveraging the fast growing influence of mobile technology. By supporting the 11 official languages of South Africa, the app has recently partnered with the Open Medicine Project of South Africa to facilitate more effective communication between healthcare providers and patients on a consultation level across language barriers.
Dream Mobile is a manufacturer of cost-effective, high performance communication devices. Built with high quality, a good support and the design in mind, its goal is to become a leading mobile internet devices manufacturer. The company notes that it wants to bring internet access to as many South Africans as possible. This would be done by offering customers with cheap smartphones as well as cheap data. It’s developing a device that goes for as little as R700 (US$70)
Government Hack South Africa is a community movement to encourage and foster collaboration between developers, coders and government. The aim is to increase efficiency and improve sustainability by creating practical solutions to government problems. Through using open data and putting it into a plan and structure, coders can solve a problem and supply a working prototype that the community can use. By recognising projects that show creativity, feasibility for implementation and quality of the product, coders can be encouraged to take on other projects and to connect with other coders.
