Ansonique Cuffy and Nicholai Williams of team E Tech have booked their places at the GSMA 4YN Start-up Event in Barcelona, Spain in February 2024 after emerging as winners of the ‘Open Category’ in this year’s ‘icode784’ competition held at the Kingstown Baptist Church on November 15.
The team also walked away with EC$5,000, a trophy and the trip.
They won with the presentation ‘Evangelize’ which according to Cuffy was a platform for churches to be able to provide information to the public.
The app allows users to do livestreams, listen to daily devotions and songs and connect with churches throughout the world and here in St Vincent and the Grenadines.
The team of Cuffy and Williams edged Team ‘IRIS’ comprised of Emma Rose and Luke Wilson with their presentation ‘Vingo’.
Rose and Wilson won themselves $3,000 along with smart phones from FLOW and trophy from the NTRC and Team S And N Innovations (Sarah Foster and Nathan Warrick) won with their presentation ‘SM-SVG’.
And the Union Island Secondary School (U.I.S.S), for the second year in a row, won the ‘Secondary Idea’ category their presentation ‘VincyTwang’ which allows users to translate Vincentian dialect.
According to team members Akeeliah Ashton and Derissa James, they noticed that visitors to the Grenadine Island often had issues communicating with locals and the app was created to solve that problem.
The U.I.S.S topped the category followed by Team ‘Young Minds’ which comprised of Kendal Sampson and Ryan Charles-Fernandez of the St Vincent Grammar School (SVGS) with their app idea ‘Eco-Tour’ winning $2,500 compliments VINLEC and tablets compliments King Computer.
And rounding up the top three in the Secondary Idea category and representing the SVGS was the team of Rian Veira and Jediah Seymour with the app ‘Anitrack’.
And in the ‘Secondary Mobile application’ category, first place went to GKA Coders of the Girls’ High School (GHS – Ginniek Shallow, Kyrah Sargeant and Annaliese Mapp), team J.J.A.M Tech of the SVGS (Andre Quamina, Matthew Wilson, Jonathan Wood and Jediah Sayers) and in third position the Sandy Bay Secondary School with team members Philicia McCoy, Ashanti Cain and Shackeah Lorraine.
Prizes awarded in this category were $5,000 compliments VINLEC and laptops compliment the NTRC for first place: $3,000 and trophies for second and $2,000 and trophies for third.
In other top prizes awarded at the Grand Finale went to the SVGS as the school with the most entries with 10.
This year’s competition was officially launched on September 13 with 52 teams registering to participate.
And of which 29 teams advanced to the finals following the preliminaries which took place on October 14 and 25.