Innovation, creativity on display @ IBM ‘CogniHack Lagos 2016’
Team CogniHack
The abundance and quality of talent in the country’s local technology space was showcased recently to the friendly geeks at IBM.
Showcasing its ongoing investment in the local technology space, IBM chose Africa’s most populous city to convene “CogniHack Lagos 2016”, a software coding competition, specifically designed to brush up the cloud and cognitive computing skills of the software development community.
“CogniHack Lagos 2016”, the coding challenge assembled scores of pre-selected local talent – from idea generators to app designers, freelance programmers, budding software designers and creative hacks.
They came from academia; independent software vendors from places as far as Ibadan, Abeokuta, Abuja, Gusau in Zamfara state, and Zaria in Kaduna state, including a coding teams from local start-ups Software Alliance, Relational Technologies, Andela (which recently got a multi-million-dollar boost from Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg), and United Kingdom-based team of Nigerian-born developers.
Their collective tasks was to collaborate on developing solutions for the financial services sector, using IBM’s BlueMix development platform, Watson Developer Cloud and other IBM and third party cloud-based tools.
Their resultant applications will be web and mobile ready. And they had less than 72 hours to come up with their mobile and web-based blueprints.
The young innovators were challenged to unleash their software design and coding skills on building software solutions around customer engagement and customer insights.
But before even getting them to work in teams at its Client and Innovation Center in Lagos (venue of the coding competition), it had curated a series of banking industry challenges and issues from local banks for the constructive teams (white hackers) to work on, pooling them into easily addressable hackathon prompts.
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1 Comments
Why do we like deluding ourselves. Coding comes very natural to any engineering undergraduate and graduate. What they lack is fairly constant electric power (about 18 hours everyday ).
Lack of electric power is the most frustrating event today in the Nigerian tech and engineering sector. Whether start-up or established firms.
Ofcourse, Nigeria relishes being seen to be part of any international fad. Coding, start-ups and SME seem to be the current buzzwords, so we must quickly go-through-the-motion of doing something in this direction (just as other nations ).
IF NIGERIA SINCERELY WISHES TO ACHIEVE ANY REASONABLE DEVELOPMENT, THEN, IT MUST PROVIDE POWER.
We will review and take appropriate action.