Digital Natives have been announced winners of the inaugural women-focused Women Hackers Unite hackathon in South Africa.
Digital Natives impressed the judges, which was made up of three top female engineers from Facebook, with its “Update Me” education app.
The Update Me app ensures busy parents are constantly informed about their children’s progress in school, providing them access to their daily class attendance, academic records and even official term reports and the ability to interact with their teachers.
Team Helpher, whose “Helpher” mobile app helps women to deal with domestic violence and abuse by acting as a panic button when pressed – it sends a message to a third party who calls the Police or assist the victim themselves, placed second while team SmartHealth, whose secure automated web solution stores patient data and makes it available to relevant doctors, paramedics and the patients at any given point in time, placed third.
Digital Natives from Pretoria were awarded the grand prize of ZAR150,000 as winners of the hackathon.
The event wasn’t just about hacking as there was time for Veronica Motloutsi, Vodacom’s Head of Online and Self-International Markets Service and Kim Berman, Executive Director of Artist Proof Studio in Newtown, Johannesburg to speak on topics bordering on women, Internet, leadership and so on.
The hackathon was organized in order to assemble women software developers or hackers from South Africa and other African countries and have them solve humanity’s problems, especially those affecting women, through technology.
The event took place from August 25 – 27, 2015 at the Cortex Hub, an Eastern Cape entrepreneurial hub where the next generation of tech innovators are groomed.