News

« Strathmore’s Blades Shine in Pre-Season Basketball Tourney
School of Accountancy Builds More Accounting Capacity in Tanzania »

BBIT Students Win Awards at Kenya ICT Board Mobile Phone Apps Contest
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.