Four Egyptian teams win Facebook Bots contest

CAIRO – 6 July 2017: Last year, Facebook lunched a challenge called Facebook Bots for messenger to recognize developers from the Middle East and North Africa region and Sub-Saharan Africa who are able to come up with the most innovative new bots on messenger. Applications were accepted from February 15, 2016 until April 28, 2017.

The three categories in which developers competed were: Gaming and Entertainment, Productivity and Utility, and Social Good.

Facebook shortlisted 60 finalists in 10 teams from each region for the three categories.

Each of the 60 finalists won a Ger VR and a mobile phone, one hour of Facebook mentorship, and tools and services from a Facebook program designed to help early stage mobile start-ups build and develop their bots.

Four Egyptian teams were among the six winners of the contest: in the Productivity and Utility category, ‘Mr. Ink’ won first place, in the Gaming and Entertainment category, ‘Mastermind Games’ won second place, and in the Social Good category, the first and the second places were won by ‘Mathhook’ and ‘Adam 9 Months’ respectively.

‘Adam 9 Months’ “aims to build a community for pregnant women. The user sets her language and current week of pregnancy to get immediate access to week related information, fetal development videos, workouts and many other pregnancy tools. (It) encourages social activities between the new mom and her friends… allows users to search for nearby pregnancy care centers, baby stores or maternity services providers," according to the official website of the competition.

Ahmed Fawazy, the founder of ‘Adam 9 Months,’ told Egypt Today that he was so proud when they won second place. He was not expecting that they were going to win because the competition was being tough.

The Adam 9 Months bot was established 5 months earlier, it was originally going to be an iOS application; however, creating the application was too expensive for Ahmed’s budget, hence he applied to the Facebook Bot competition and developed the bot to be compatible with Messenger.

What he won was $10,000 and 3 months of Facebook mentorship (1 hour per month).