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  2. Winners of Sas48 Challenge announced; Health app bags first prize
11-11-2019

Oman Observer

Organized by the Ministry of Technology and Communications (MTC) with a strategic partnership with Omantel, the fifth edition of Sas48 Challenge concluded yesterday at Omantel headquarters in Madinat Al Irfan. During 48 hours from Thursday, November 7 until Saturday November 9, the teams developed their ideas into a prototype.

The first prize winner (RO3,000) was Team iSense for an application that will monitor a child’s temperature using the Internet of Things

The second prize winner (RO2,000) was Team SasTabeeb for an application to develop centralized healthcare using cloud computing and big data.

The third prize winner was (RO1,000) Team Dar for an application to help customers furnish their homes and offices by using VirtualReality & AugmentedReality.

The closing ceremony was under the patronage of Dr Hamad bin Said bin Sulaiman al Aufi, Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries.

Dr Salim Sultan Al Ruzaiqi, CEO at the Ministry of Technology and Communications, said, “This edition of the challenge is a continuation on the success of the competition previous editions, and to adopt the technological trends and updates, the 4-IR solutions theme was added to this year’s edition. We witnessed innovative ideas in different fields and we hope that all teams continue in the path of entrepreneurship whether they win this challenge or not and we wish to see successful emerging Omani companies competing on a local, regional and international levels.”

Samy Ahmed al Ghassani, COO, Omantel, said,” We are looking forward to seeing these projects in reality as start-ups that enrich the ICT sector in Oman and support the sultanate’s efforts towards the digital transformation.” He added, “With this strategic partnership , Omantel is committed to continue supporting the Omani youth, transform their ideas and visions to reality, provide the innovation and creativity environment in order the reduce the digital gap in the sultanate as planned by Omantel Vision 3.0.”

 Joao Rei who is a Moderator and Business Mentor from Garage48 team from Estonia talked about their experience in this competition for the fifth year. He said, “We are back here in Oman to do another edition of Sas48 and try to boost the entrepreneurship culture of Oman and so far we’re very happy to see the results and how the teams are progressing and we also see that the mindsets have become even more open to innovation and to building prototypes in a very short amount of time.”

On their participation in Sas48, Sultan al Busaidi from DMI team who is participating for the third time said, “The difference between this version and the previous ones lies in the mechanism of choosing the project ideas, and having a central focus on 4-IR technologies because it is one of the most important prospects of the future.”

Mazin Al-Maawali from QR trust team who participated for the second time said, “The challenge added a lot to me and the most important skill I learned is time management.”

Amal al Kindi from iSence team said, “Sas48 is very fun, I used to hear a lot about this challenge until I got a chance to participate and I decided to work as hard as I can to implement our idea and prove ourselves.” While Hajar Al-Nasri from “Hasaad team” said, “The competition is absolutely great and I benefited the most from the evaluation and the guidance on the projects from my friends, the mentors, Garage48 tam and Sas Center for Entrepreneurship team.”

This year’s challenge witnessed the participation of 104 competitors who vary from college and university students in their final year to job seekers, employees, and people interested in app development, web development or 4-IR solutions. The aim of this challenge is to enhance the culture of entrepreneurship and encourage creative thinking in information and communication technologies (ICT). The organizing team divided the participants into 18 teams based on their specializations and the teams’ ideas were directed to several fields of work like a business, environment, healthcare, culture, legal and others.

Some of the ideas that resulted from this challenge are: as follows:

  1. PlanB, which solves the startups’ problems, like how to organize sales, fees, storage, rent …etc. by designing an app to organize all this with the administrator, storage manager, and salesperson.
  2. Almuhamoon App for law firms consultation and hiring in which most law firms have an account on it, customers can interact with the law firm.
  3. Don’t Miss It (DMI) App to watch events live with notifications a week or more before the event and it will use 360 cameras and plans to have artificial intelligence (AI) in the future.
  4. Dar app helps customers furnish their homes, offices while being wherever they are and it uses Augmented Reality and 3D modeling technologies.
  5. Greeny Oman is a mobile app that allows you to share your car with people who live in a close neighborhood and want to go to work in the same area.
  6. Kaizen is a system to be built in houses and made of an app, website sensors (devices) to assess the situation and brief the firefighters when they’re on their way to the location.