Archive for March, 2009

BBIT Students Win Awards at Kenya ICT Board Mobile Phone Apps Contest
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Apps Champ Grace Kihumbi (r) receives award check from Kenya ICT Board Chairwoman Catherine Ngahu

Apps Champ Grace Kihumbi (r) receives award check from Kenya ICT Board Chairwoman Catherine Ngahu

Strathmore student Grace Kihumba has won the Kenya ICT Board’s inaugural Mobile Applications Competition, a contest to advance development of cellphone software applications in Kenya. Fellow Strathmoreans Sospeter Muriu, and Hussein Lightwalla were the first and second runners up respectively. Grace, Sospeter and Hussein have all just received their BBIT degrees from Strathmore last week.

Grace’s winning application was a sales application customized for use by East African Breweries Limited. The application runs on Blackberry phone and enables distributors to collect sales data on the phone, send data to a server, insert it in a database, and produce varied reports.

Sospeter’s runner-up application on Python makes it possible for users to view and manipulate ID3 tags on the S60 phones. While S60 phones can play MP3 files, their users until now could not view or manipulate the files’ ID3 tags, which provide information such as track number, artists, and genre related with MP3 files.

Hussein’s application was known as Wordmatica. It is a simple word game in Python to be played on Series 60 Nokia cellphones. The game basically involves exchanging words with the computer. Each player must give at each round a unique, legitimate English word that begins with the letter with which the opponent’s last word ended.
Speaking at the awards ceremony, Mr. Paul Kukubo, CEO of the Kenya ICT Board, said that an essential factor ICT innovation and development is an “enabling institution” of higher education, such as the role Stanford University has played in Silicon Valley in the US. Strathmore University, Mr. Kukubo continued, is playing such a role in Kenya.

 

Strathmore’s Blades Shine in Pre-Season Basketball Tourney
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

Strathmore University’s mens’ basketball team, the Blades, took highest honors in the Kenya Basketball Federation (KBF) pre-season tournament on March 21st and 22nd at the KCB Grounds in Ruaraka. The tournament was meant to prepare teams for the KBF premier league season which will kick off on April 4th. The Blades were the pre-season gala’s defending champions after beating Cooperative Bank in the finals last year.

 

In the opening game, Blades, pitted against Africa Nazarene University,  won 47-42. Mohamed Abdi and Ambrose Sigu each contributed 11 points. In the second match, the Blades narrowly lost 49-44 to Lamboritz, a squad that was recently promoted to the premier league. Frank Simiyu scored 15 points as Michael Otula added 2 long-range three-pointers, but that was not enough to win the game.

In their third match, the Blades took on Naivasha Prisons, handily winning by 56-15

. Edwin Otula, Mike Otula, Joshua Oswana and Mohamed Abdi each sank two three-pointers. The win lifted the Blades to the semi finals where they prevailed over KCA University 55-40. The team scored 40 points all from open shots as David Ogolla and Kelvin Waweru combined well to steer the team to the finals.The two teams were evenly matched in the first three quarters, with quarterly scores of 7-8, 11-11, and 12-12. But a strong 11-2 fourth quarter scoring drive by The Blades powered Strathmore to victory. Kelvin Waweru and David Ogolla led the way to ensure that Blades successfully defended their tournament crown.

 

 

Ochieng praised the team and noted that only two senior players took part in this tournament. “Most of the players we fielded today joined us this year which is a good thing for purposes of development and depth and ensuring there is more competition amongst players,” Ochieng noted.

 

 

. As of this posting, the Blades are leading in the Universities Basketball League, having won all the five matches they have played so far.