The Appsafrica.com Innovation Awards celebrate the best in mobile and tech from across the continent and we now preview the Best African App finalists from over 200 submissions from 25 countries.
Supported by Uber, Opera, Mobile Monday South Africa (MOMO) the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) and the MMA the Awards celebrate the best in mobile and tech from across Africa, providing winners with global publicity, recognition and networking with 300+ industry peers at the Awards party in Cape Town on November 14th.
Zynar – Africa
Zynar.co is the first crowdsourced app development platform across Africa. The solution brings app users or testers and app developers or software companies together in a simplified manner. Once a software or app developer adds a project on the platform, Zynar assigns the project to testers based on the requirement of the app developer. The advantage of this is that an app developer in Kenya can build apps for users in Lagos or Accra and all over Africa and get testers and users immediately.
Spacepointe – Nigeria
Over 80 percent of commerce in Africa happens at the informal sector. The quintessential informal retailer is small with English not a first language, does not have a computer and probably has a cell phone. PointePay was designed to drive mCommerce by including the informal sector. Depending on what the MSME can afford, there are multiple types of payments available to them. With PointePay, retialer can sell in stores but also manage their online marketplace with integrated inventory.
Domestly – South Africa
Domestly is advancing the way the world cleans their homes. By utilizing technology to connect cleaning professionals directly to homeowners, they make housekeeping more affordable and accessible to everyone, and at the same time create business and opportunities for cleaners.
The platform provides job creation for women, empowering South African women who are unemployed or underemployed. Domestly cleaners can set their own rates. Not only does this offer the customers a range of rates to choose from, but it also allows the cleaner to control her earning power.
Sliide Airtime -Nigeria
Accessing the internet from a mobile device is expensive for most Africans. Sliide Airtime has developed a commercially funded model that provides free airtime to users and makes accessing the internet more affordable. Users earn free airtime simply by having the app on their phone. Additional airtime can be earned by completing in-app offers and recommending the service to friends. 50% of the Sliide revenue from showing adverts is then given as mobile data back to the users, allowing them to access the internet for free.
Vula Mobile – South Africa
Picture a junior doctor at a hospital, at the end of a dirt road, hours from the nearest big town with no landline phone. There is a patient in front of the doctor who has a severe eye problem and needs specialist advice.
Not an easy situation, but Vula Mobile has created a specialist network solution which assists health care professionals through a mobile app utilising instant messaging and public sector health workers to provide assistance in these situations.
Vula Mobile instant messaging has a unique ‘On Call’ system. A specialist goes ‘On Call’ and will receive all messages for his/her speciality at his/her hospital. When going ‘Off Duty’ he/she is required to nominate another specialist. This ensures that there is always a specialist ‘On Call’ to help health workers.
This means that any remote health worker can choose the hospital and the specialty required and is then connected instantly to the right specialist.
Follow @appsafrica for updates on the winners.
