Sunday Oct 06, 2024
Sunday Oct 06, 2024
Friday, 20 September 2013 02:50 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
the University of Moratuwa. The event was organised by the Ideamart team of Dialog Axiata PLC and the E-Club of the University of Moratuwa.
The university students were provided with adequate time to come up with an idea for a Mobile Application development using available APIs of Ideamart. 18 ideas were selected from over 100 entries that were submitted. The short listed 18 teams comprised of four members; each were given the opportunity to make their products come alive at the Hackathon.
At the end of the event, the following morning three winning teams were elected and were awarded with Android Tabs, Mobile Phones and Dongles from Dialog Axiata PLC. The Hackathon was also enlivened by a separate recreational area with games, music, food and beverages where the participants relaxed when required. The Ideamart developer support team was present at the location to solve queries, support development, provide feedback and enrich the ideas when requested by the students.
“We are proud of the achievements of the students of the University of Moratuwa and happy that we managed to build this platform that gave them the opportunity to showcase their talents,” Dialog Axiata PLC Group Chief Information Officer Anthony Rodrigo said.
“The true power of a service delivery platform was displayed during the Ideamart UoM Hackathon with some great applications being developed overnight. This goes on to showcase how easy it is to create a multifunctional mobile application in a short time period using the Ideamart platform. I wish all participants a bright future and success in all their future endeavours and hope the public will much benefit from the applications that these students created during the Hackathon.”
Dialog’s Ideamart is a service delivery platform that bridges the gap between Dialog’s telecommunication network and the general public. The platform contains simple web based templates that could be turned in to alert services and feedback receiving mechanisms. For those with knowledge to develop mobile applications, the platform provides API’s to combine and create value added applications. Hence, the Ideamart platform allows any individual with or without technical know-how to create mobile applications, market them and earn money. Dialog gives back 70% of the revenue earned via Ideamart applications back to the developers of the application. Many content providers including creative students at university at present benefit monetarily by having their applications published on Ideamart.
“It was great to see the enthusiasm shown by both the Dialog team and the students right from the beginning to the end of the event. I was impressed by the students’ achievements at the end of the Hackathon. The range of APIs offered by Ideamart made it possible for students to come up with creative apps really fast,” Prof. Dileeka Dias, of the University of Moratuwa said. “This was an opportunity for them to get a unique experience, and also a glimpse of a future in technology innovation. I appreciate the efforts of EClub, particularly for facilitating students from different disciplines to participate. I hope that this would become an annual event received with even more enthusiasm in future.”
Taxi Buddy, an application that allows locate and contact the closest taxi developed by Team Extrogen emerged Winners at the Hackathon. They were followed by the application ORACLE, which has natural language processing capabilities turns any phone to a smartphone. The Colombo Route Finder, a simple SMS based platform that allows a user to find the closest and the best bus route to get from Point A to Point B were placed as 3rd place winners. Lost phone finder, Intelligent Seeker, Mega Mind – an SMS query Application were some of the other notable developments which came through during this night.
Ruwan Dissanayake, a member of the Winning team of the University of Moratuwa Hackathon said, “We are really happy about the winning and I believe that we won it because of the dedication of my team at the Hackathon and as we planned the day to deliver a working product.”
“TaxiBuddy is an application which can be used to find the nearest taxi where taxi drivers, passengers and automobile advertisers are benefited. We used all the Dialog Ideamart APIs for our application. We developed Taxibuddy for feature phones, android and windows phone.”
