Digital Jam 3.0 Winners Urged To Capitalize On Competition

Minister of State in the Ministry of Science, Technology, Energy and Mining, Hon. Julian Robinson, is urging winners of the recently concluded Digital Jam 3.0 Apps Competition (Caribbean edition), to use this platform for the future development of their projects.

The State Minister, who was speaking at a specially convened handing-over ceremony at the corporate offices of the World Bank in Kingston on Tuesday, April 29, told the winners that, “these are just means to an end, they’re tools, which we hope you will use in the furtherance of the ideas you have developed and in moving your projects forward. There are plans going forward to ensure these ideas actually become businesses”.

Minister Robinson said Digital Jam was more successful than the organisers expected, and that investors were impressed.

“They were only here for a weekend, a couple of days to see on display what you came up with and they were so impressed that they want to invest hard currency in your ideas.  These investors … expect a return on their investment,” he noted.

The winners included: Crimebot, which copped US$10,000 for an application, which maps crime hotspots and alerts users to crimes in their neighbourhoods; Route 876, an application to help persons determine bus routes, and the length of time it takes to travel from one point to another.

Other innovations include: Pan Chicken Dash – a chicken chase game; MediReview, a medical application to help doctors, and their patients with non-communicable diseases to keep track of appointments, treatments and health status;

E L Jam Tutor, an education application for children to support learning; and Banana Bill, a game in which users collect falling bananas, with differing levels of difficulty.

Digital Jam 3.0 was organised by the Government of Jamaica, the World Bank, and the Government of Canada.  Other key partners include the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), the Development Bank of Jamaica, the OECS Secretariat, Microsoft, LIME, Google, The Gleaner, JAMPRO, InfoDev, and other corporate entities.

More than 50 teams from Jamaica, Barbados, Dominica, Haiti, Antigua and Barbuda, Trinidad and Tobago, and St. Kitts and Nevis, participated in the initiative.