Eleven African teams are among the finalists facing off at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup finals in St Petersburg, Russia, battling another 76 teams from 71 countries around the world.
The African teams in Russia include Angolan UMA in the Games segment with their game Don’t Fret, as well as teams from Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco and South Africa in the Innovations category.
Seven teams are representing Africa in the World Citizenship category: Algeria (Team Ask Design), Botswana (Team Tandabala), Ivory Coast (Team Kernel), Kenya (Team PI Craft), Tunisia (Team Wise Team) and Uganda (Team Code 8).
No African teams will be represented in the Windows 8 Challenge, Windows Phone Challenge and Windows Azure categories.
The winners of the three top categories will win US$50,000 and US$12,000 Women’s Empowerment Awards co-sponsored by UN Women for apps with the aim to “help empower women to improve their lives, their rights and their futures”.
Last year the Ukrainian Team Quadsquad were the overall winners with their device Enable Talk, which uses a pair of gloves equipped with 15 flex sensors and a microcontroller that continuously recognises sign language patterns.
The patterns are then transmitted via Bluetooth to a Windows Phone device that uses the Microsoft Speech API and Bing API to translate the signs into audio.
