South Africa’s RLabs Are the Winners of BBC Hackathon
As a mean of complementing its renewed digital investment, the BBC wants to cover better the African continent by reaching out to the continent’s local tech scenes to spearhead innovation. The broadcaster set up a hackathon competition in South Africa to develop innovative ideas that will help the company gain more African youth listeners for the BBC audio through a digital platform.
A team of South African innovators under the name RLabs emerged the winners with their CatchUp solution. The team came up a simple digital widget that can be placed on a website and allow users to listen to short clips of BBC audio without any distractions. The Cape Town-based RLabs team went up against 11 other teams in a two-day hackathon event and emerged victorious. They came up with various technologies all geared towards finding new ways of delivering BBC audio in a cost-efficient manner to the youth.
Related: Kenya Techies Selected For The BBC Digital Pilot Program In Africa
RLabs’ CatchUp solution was selected as the winner because it took into consideration important factors such as simple navigation, cost efficiency and works with BBC’s external partners. BBC says it will fund RLabs to pilot and user test prototypes for the next six months.
Image Credit: BBC