In the spirit of International Mandela day mLab recently ran a virtual competition for innovators to spend their 67 minutes creating a mobile concept to solve a need in their community.

We were blown away by the quality of entries and the good spirit the participants showed in solving some of our everyday problems through mobile. This made the challenge of selecting worthy winners of our Angry Bird family a really hard task, but in the end we selected the top 5 ideas.

THE WINNERS ARE! *virtual drum roll*…and in no particular order:

Lawrense Matjeni created a concepts that would help local Doctors and Patients stay connected and make scheduling an appointment and follow up a breeze. Lawrense also spent 67 minutes creating a cool Mandela Day screensaver app featuring our beloved Madiba jiggling away on screen. The app will be available for Android very soon.

Thabang Mokoena‘s concept looked at solving the bad culture of not saving we have in South Africa. His mobile solution makes it easy for consumers to save every time they shop with little impact on their cash flow and yet effective enough to make those piggy banks full for a rainy day.

Ian Tyner, an innovator living in Australia, saw our challenge on twitter and decided to participate by submitting his idea for a powerful agriculture app.

Melvin Musehani figured out a smart way to assist and empower a victim or a bystander to assist in a medical emergency through some clever use of mobile technology.

Mark Jackson submitted two awesome ideas: One putting the power back in the communities hands to help solve theft related crimes and the other helps school children revive the standards in our education system by holding teachers and fellow students responsible to the greater community. We liked both ideas so much that we decided to award Mark half an Angry Bird for each!

Big thanks to our community for participating in this virtual challenge and putting some time aside to make the world a better place.


Mandela Day, Apps for Good Challenge prizes