Team Crystal emerged the winner of the HackJos hackathon held in Jos, northern Nigeria, for its mobile-based GSM home automation system.
Disrupt Africa reported last month Hotels.ng was sponsoring the hackathon, the first of its kind in northern Nigeria, aimed at encouraging developers to come up with solutions for the region’s problems.
Team Crystal, led by Nnamdi Ibe with Emmanuel Okorie and Bebeyi Grace Abiodun as team members, was declared the winner after 30 coders in 9 teams from Jos, Abuja and Bauchi worked on web, desktop, hardware and mobile projects.
The system developed by Team Crystal 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.
The team won a package including free tech support from Nignux Technologies until launch, a one-year free private account from GitHub, an iPad for each team member from Travel Bay, three days free hotel stay from Hotels.ng and six months of free branding and business model development work from MINDcapital.
Team Bauchi came second with LokalShopper, which is based on the idea of ‘hooks and broadcasts’ where information can be broadcasted within a geo-community, while Team Ivory came third for its app that generates a random number used in cryptography.
Daser David, the head of the team behind HackJos, said he was hoping the competition could become an annual affair.
“This is just the first step into creating a technological hub in Jos and what we will call ‘Silicon Plateau’,” he said.
