Vietnamese Hackers Hack For Women And Children: UNICEF Mobile Hackathon’s 8 Winners

After 36 hours of strenuous hacking and ideating, 31 teams finally pitched last Sunday afternoon in Ho Chi Minh city’s Saigon Hub to a panel of judges from UNICEF, mLab East Asia, and Infodev. The end result? Four teams went home with some well earned cash. But I delayed writing this article because mLab had a cool extra announcement, there are actually eight winners in total – a nice surprise twist for four extra teams which will get awarded by UNICEF. These final eight teams will now compete for three development prizes worth up to $6,000. Nokia is also sponsoring another $10,000 to the overall top winner.

As we mentioned recently, the UNICEF Hackathon has two challenges. The first challenge was focused on building a mobile product for pregnant women and early childhood. The second challenge was focused on building a marketplace for socially responsible tourism involving children. A panel of judges from Nokia, mLab, UNICEF, and industry leaders in mobile chose the top teams. Here are the 4 first winners that were announced at the event of the hackathon (none of these products are online yet):

1. CucCung – This team already has a product for iOS and Android for helping pregnant women with their nutrition. For today, instead of going smartphone, the team built a platform that allows doctors to send important reminders to their pregnant patients via SMS. The system will automate texts and prompt doctors if and when they would like to send out the notifications. This allows doctors to keep in touch with their patients. In other words, it’s an SMS-enabled customer relationship management system for medical care. This is especially useful for people in the countryside who do not use smartphones.
2. iTEKnot – Similar to CucCung.vn, iTEKnot built a service that enables patients to interact with doctors over SMS. But this concept allows patients to check in with doctors. The team also hopes to piggyback relevant advertisements to mothers in need of specific nutritional products like vitamins or medicines.
3. Ocean 4 – This service is basically a Tripadvisor for socially responsible tourism. Thus, it’s built specifically as niche for tourists interested in checking out community-oriented places where they can volunteer or contribute in some meaningful way.
4. Newway – This Android app looks to partner with various orphanages across the region, and connect tourists to these orphans. Thus, tourists and travelers who are interested in seeing and helping out orphans in Vietnam can go straight to this app to connect and share.

Following the hackathon, there were so many great teams that the judges decided to select the top eight teams to continue competing for the four development prizes, valued at $16,000. These come with the promise that within the next six months, the apps that were developed and brainstormed by the end of the hackathon would be published. The goal is to have the apps in functional beta by October 30 this year.

The above criteria means that mLab will be actively engaged in incubating the new teams, helping them get their products online. Thus, in total, mLab will be actively engaged with a total of eight teams. The four extra developer prize teams are:

1. Ga Trong – An iOS (soon-to-be Android and Windows phone) app that generates a timeline for pregnant mothers. The app will, according to the timeline, give women information about the correct nutrition they should have, proper healthcare, and important data on how to treat and care for the baby.
2. BH Media – This iOS app (soon-to-be Android and other platforms) doesn’t just look at pregnant mothers, but also looks at helping women up to six months before conceiving. That means if you are planning to have a baby, the app would help you prepare, in terms of nutrition, medicine, and other information useful to you. All of this is facilitated by push notifications and SMS.
3. Child_VN – An Android app that reminds pregnant women of what they need to do according to their trimesters. It also includes a game that the mothers can play in order to learn about taking care of themselves.
4. PAT – An iOS and Android app that includes coupons for various hotels, restaurants, coffee shops, and locations for tourists. When tourists spend at these locations, a percentage of the money will go to charities that support children.

According to Brett Dickstein, representative at mLab, and key coordinator for the hackathon:

This competition is based on infoDev’s “From Mind to Market” approach designed to source ideas from a large talent pool through a crowdsourcing campaign to facilitate mobile app ideation in a fast-paced process. The UNICEF Mobile Haclathon is an open innovation competition model designed to help the best innovators turn their ideas into sustainable, viable, scalable apps.