Mozambique's capital city Maputo. CC image courtesy of Andrew Moir.
SoftFeng, an app that helps tourists find and book points of interests, has won the third Mozambican Tourism Hackathon (HackMoz), bagging US$2,670.
The winning app, developed by four students from the University of Eduardo Mondlane, will also get a 12-month collaboration with Maputo business incubator BPartner which should help them launch to market.
Sixteen teams took part in the two-day event and Fabio Dimande, one of SoftFeng’s developers, said: “It was complicated at the start of the process, but thanks to the help we got from the workshops we managed to get a pretty good application in the end.
“When we realised we had won it was just a burst of happiness going through my body.”
A number of local companies contributed to the hackathon, which was preceded by a three-day training course in programming, business development and marketing.
The Noobs team, which built the MozEventos app to provide information on events and facilitating buying tickets, came second, while the A.P.A team won third prize for their food app Kukuma, which seeks out suitable restaurants for tourists.
Sixty-eight people attended HackMoz, which was organised by the Ministry of Science and Technology with support from the Southern Africa Innovation Support (SAIS) programme, the Republic of Finland and the Kingdom of Sweden.
