After weeks of planning and training prospective coders and hackers in Ruby on Rails and PHP, the #HackJos hackathon finally held on the 23rd and 24th of March in the city of Jos.
The competition had 30 coders in 9 teams from Jos, Abuja and Bauchi in attendance as they worked on projects that cut across web, desktop, hardware and mobile projects.
The teams were: Team Crystal, Team Simplex, Team Emblematic, Team Brainiac, Team Emerald, Team Ivory, Team Phoenix, Team Dynamite and Team Bauchi.
At the end of the competition, Team Crystal led by Nnamdi Ibe with Emmanuel Okorie and Bebeyi Grace Abiodun as team members emerged the winner of the competition for their mobile-based GSM home automation system.
The system uses a mobile device from anywhere in the world to control electrical appliances in the home or office. It is also able to detect temperature, light intensity and motion changes in the environment and give feedback on the state of the appliances to a mobile user interface.
Team Bauchi made up of Sotaya Yakubu and Ibrahim Timothy Onogu came second in the competition with their very first web development project where they tinkered with an existing project to create LokalShopper.
LokalShopper is based on the idea of ‘hooks and broadcasts’, where various information may be broadcasted within a geo-community; while at the same time, some people within the geo-community may be looking for that information.
Most online shopping services that allow third-party retailers require the retailers to run a form of ‘organized retail’, which involves the managing of some online records. LokalShopper is targeted at retail stores who do not have the time, skills or resources to run an organized retail store.
With LokalShopper, a prospective buyer can use the app or website to indicate interest in a good, and all the stores that stock the good within the geo-community will be notified. They are then able to notify the buyer if they have the good in stock or not.
The third position went to Team Ivory, made up of Agbo Jude Peter, Igege Precious Aduma and Manni Kitgwim Christopher, all students of the University of Jos who developed an app that generates a random number used in cryptography. The random number is made to be highly unpredictable and close to real phenomena like in quantum mechanics. The application of this app is to be able to encrypt files that are almost impossible to unscramble in a new concept called ‘multi-dimensional cryptography.”
The first prize gets a package that includes: free tech support from Nignux Technologies until launch; one year free private account from GitHub; an iPad for each team member from Travel Bay; 3 days free hotel stay by hotels.ng and 6 months of free branding and business model development work from MINDcapital.
The second prize winners gets 1 year free private account from GitHub and free tech support from Nignux Technologies until launch and the third prize gets 6 months free private account from GitHub and free tech support from Nignux Technologies.
According to Daser David, the head of the team behind #HackJos, they are hoping that the competition becomes an annual affair and that the 2016 edition will be bigger and better.
“This is just the first step into creating a technological hub in Jos and what we will call ‘Silicon Plateau’”, he said.
