A dream trip to Silicon Valley in California, the United States of America will become true for some lucky youthful Malawians who shall emerge winners in a TNM Smart Challenge for innovative tech-savvy youths in the country.<\/p>\n
Silicon Valley in Northern California hosts head offices for most of the world\u2019s largest high-tech and ICT corporations.<\/p>\n
TNM head of marketing, Webster Mbekeyani, said the competition is aimed at providing a platform for Malawian youth to compete in the development of ICT applications.<\/p>\n
He said the competition has three categories namely Smart Kid, Student and Smart Community and that in all the three youths will compete either as individuals or groups to develop socially-relevant ICT applications.<\/p>\n
\u201cShortlisted projects will be put to a public vote and top winners in the first two categories will earn a trip to Silicon Valley,\u201d said Mbekeani.<\/p>\n
He said the outstanding project in the Smart Community category will be an academic institution or technology organisation and will win a computer laboratory in addition to mentorship from Facebook and free developer tools worth US$30,000.<\/p>\n
Other prizes in the competition include Samsung Galaxy S6, Ipad Mini 2, branded Facebook goodies, Haus JS T700 tablets and website linkages.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are looking for innovative ideas and projects that can take Malawi\u2019s ICT and mobile technology to greater heights,\u201d said Mbekeyani.<\/p>\n
He said while in Silicon Valley, the winners will visit the head offices of the world\u2019s leading ICT companies, namely Apple, Facebook and Google.<\/p>\n
The will also visit Stanford University, one of the highly respected Ivy league universities in the US.<\/p>\n
TNM has joined hands with mHub, a Lilongwe-based firm technology entrepreneurship, as well as Facebook, IBM, Opera Software and Google as technology partners in the competition.<\/p>\n
The partners are expected to provide advice on implementation of the programme and support a platform through which application developers will be incubated \u2013from development, testing to launching of apps, according to Mbekeani.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A dream trip to Silicon Valley in California, the United States of America will become true for some lucky youthful Malawians who shall emerge winners in a TNM Smart Challenge for innovative tech-savvy youths in the country. Silicon Valley in Northern California hosts head offices for most of the world\u2019s largest high-tech and ICT corporations. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":10123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10124,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10119\/revisions\/10124"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}