An article from the perspective of a participant at the on-going MEST48 software development challenge.
So MEST48 began on Monday, 14th January 2013. The experience has been great so far. I would just run you through events for yesterday and do my best to explain the ideas that were pitched in the MEST Conference Hall in the late hours of the morning.
The event as you know from a previous post is open to students from MEST, OUWA and Ashesi. We had close to 30 students from OUWA coming in and about 5 or 6 from Ashesi University. The event began at about 10 am because not everybody was ready and seated. Actually, we had few more people joining in after the official opening. Various attendees came to pitch their ideas. The ideas are as follows:
Online Book Bureau: Helps to keep kids off internet vices by creating a free ebook bureau for children.
Directrator: An online directory of businesses in Ghana
eCare: an online service to link patients to health professionals
CatchHealth: Helps you keep your weight and your fitness by keeping progress on your health information.
PhoneBooke: An app that allows you to sync your mobile phone contacts to a server with a click of a button.
Picket: Helps event organizers to get to attendees buy selling tickets, etc. Through mobile phones.
Phone Insurance: This is a service that allows you to insure your phone against any unforeseen circumstances.
Health for Social Media: A way to make social media users ergonomically responsible and be watchful of their health.
eBia Payment Platform: A payment platform that uses ticketing to help customers make purchases anywhere.
So these are the ideas that pitched on Monday at the MEST48 Product Development Competition.
After the pitches, the team formation process began, with a minimum of 3 and maximum of 5 per group. Some teams apparently had it easy finding members while others struggled to pull even two. I’m sure all team formation tassles have been resolved now. I have not visited each group (because I’m also in a group, Picket) but just from the look on faces, I can tell all eyes are on a good prototype and some Apple products.
While we wait to know the winner on Wednesday, lets keep up the good work and may the best team win.
You can catch more about the event by following the #MEST48 hashtag on Twitter.
