Lagos winner Callcamp revolutionizes customer service sector!
May 08, 2011
3 world tech companies, Google, Nokia and Blackberry joined forces with Garage48 Foundation to hold first ICT bootcamp in West-Africa. Garage48 that originally started from Estonia in Northern-Europe it has now expanded to Africa. The purpose of the event is to build new web and mobile services in one single weekend – in 48 hours.
Garage48 is known as a very intensive course for IT entrepreneurs. The focus is on bringing ideas into real life and developing great teamwork. In the beginning of the Garage48 participants pitch their ideas, network with others and form teams around their favourite ideas.The teams are competing to have the best start-up idea implementation. Intensive schedule leaves participants sometimes without sleep, but new business perspectives and contacts make it worth it. After Garage48 Lagos sleepless weekend, 9 teams launched new services at demo event 8th may at the Lagos Resource Centre, Victoria Island.
Jury announced event winner as Callcamp, what is developing service for small companies to employ students to be used as call center agents. "We are really impressed about results, what team delivered during 48 hours. Their solution can revolutionize customer service sector for small companies at all over the world," explained Garage48 Africa project manager Ragnar Sass. Jury also saw a lot potential at Extramil.es project.
Garage48 Foundation’s goal is to contribute to the local ICT startup community and work with them to improve the local ecosystem. Garage48 also helps talented developers to get into contact with successful entrepreneurs in Europe and America.
“The reason for bringing Garage48 to Nigeria is simply the fact that it is the biggest country in Africa with more then 150 million people and rapidly increasing demand for different IT and mobile services. Nigeria has now more 80m mobile service subscribers and then 24 million internet users,” said Ragnar Sass.
“I am really impressed by Nigerian hackers quality. Many ideas launched in Garage48 Lagos have potential to grow into world startups,” added Michael Weitzel, Technical Partnership Manager from Blackberry.
Aneto Okonkwo, Google Product Manager, said “It was great to see that many of the developers were tackling a lot of really hard problems across a wide variety of industries from education to tourism. There was also a lot of diversity of platforms including web, mobile and SMS”.
“It is simply extraordinary to see people coming together in team and trying to solve a local problem and that it gets done in 48 hours. The enthusiasm and quality of work done from the developers is very good” Praveen Shetty, Head of Solution Sales from Nokia West Africa.
“We hope, that concept of Garage48 will help to boost the culture of startups and entrepreneurship in Africa. Our team will travel now to Ghana, where we will hold Garage48 Accra from 13th to 15th May at Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT,“ added one of the Garage48 co-founders Priit Salumaa.
The format of Garage48 is developed by 6 Estonian entrepreneurs. Garage48’s homeland Estonia holds the first position in internet freedom in the world and is the home for the free internet calls provider Skype. Tiny, but ambitious European country, Estonia is an ICT leader in the world in many ways.
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Comments: 5
Hope to see something like this next year. I am sure so many programmers who missed this year's event would be interested in attending something like this too.
Check out this blog written by a member of Callcamp, the winning team: http://www.portlagos.com/
I missed it by the whisker! Tickets were sold out in 48 hrs so I didn't get a chance to be there!
I love It! Nice!
For the next Edition, Please Don't Forget BENIN my country!