Gathers idea contributors and industry experts to strengthen potential mobile app ideas
Last Friday, DiGi Telecommunications Sdn Bhd (DiGi) hosted #IdeaJam, the first ever idea accelerator session for its Challenge for Change (DiGiCFC) programme. This 4-hour interactive event gathered about 150 people including the Challenge's best 60 idea contributors together with industry experts to refine the quality and potential of these ideas, in a bid to identify the season's top 20.
Today, these shortlisted 20 ideators pitched their ideas to DiGi and a panel of judges consisting of DiGiCFC partners, who then selected a winning idea for each of the four categories: namely Learning & Edutainment, Health & Wellness, Discovering Culture, and Connected Citizen. The four winners, who will each go home with RM5,000 and a smartphone, will be announced in mid-February this year.
The 60 ideators for #IdeaJam were selected from close to 2,600 Malaysian-inspired mobile application ideas submitted for the Ideation Challenge, the first phase of DiGiCFC.
Stronger ideas for better social and commercial impact
#IdeaJam was a development checkpoint to help augment the quality of the top ideas submitted for Challenge for Change, and maximise the potential impact of the resulting mobile apps. It provided a conducive platform for ideators to interact with 60 specially selected mentors from the respective fields of healthcare, education, culture and citizenship. Input from the mentors helped build a social and technical context surrounding each idea, helping ideators make these ideas more compelling: having stronger commercial value, and a greater ability to address the social needs of Malaysians.
Joachim Rajaram, DiGi's Head of Communications and Corporate Responsibility said, "We were impressed with the quality of ideas submitted for season five of the Challenge. We felt these ideas clearly reflected what Malaysians want in general, using mobile internet and apps to serve their needs. It was also interesting to note that easy access to public services on mobile apps seemed to be a growing interest amongst Malaysians. This was evident from the high percentage of submissions for the newly introduced Connected Citizens category.
"It would be exciting to observe how these ideas now evolve into full-fledged apps that leverage on functionalities like gaming, M2M and social networking to name a few, and to see how well-received these apps will be. We hope that the availability of new and relevant local content will give people more reasons to use and benefit from the internet, in line with DiGi's mission to deliver internet for all Malaysian mobile users," said Joachim.
"It was also fantastic to see the positive energy between the mentors and ideators as they sparred with each other with a single objective in mind, to have the best version of these ideas emerge and have the potential to be developed into mobile apps that benefit as many Malaysians as possible. And this, I believe captured the value of DiGiCFC's theme in Bringing Malaysians Together, One App At A Time," he added.
Some of the mentors who attended the event included representatives from the National Heritage Board Malaysia, KPJ HealthCare, Macrokiosk, GBG Business Group, netpreneurs, and Malaysian internet players.
Moving on to the next stage
Following this, DiGiCFC5 will proceed to the App Development phase where local app developers will be tasked to develop mobile apps based on the four winning ideas. In conjunction with this second phase, DiGi will also host #HACK!@DiGiCFC, a 36-hour non-stop mobile app hackathon to help accelerate the app development process.
DiGiCFC5 programme partners include the Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU), 1Malaysia for Youth (iM4U), the National Digital Economy Initiative (Digital Malaysia), Google Malaysia and Microsoft Malaysia.
More information on this phase and DiGi Challenge for Change is available at www.digicfc.my.
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