Apps that Make a Difference

Samsung's Entaleq Initiative: Celebrating Egypt's Bright Minds at Cairo ICT

By Ahmed Mansour 

  Working hard to shift their focus to addressing social needs, Samsung Egypt created the Entaleq initiative, Samsung’s Application Developers Challenge. Yesterday saw the electronics giant announce the competition winners at Cairo's ICT exhibition, currently taking place at the Nasr City's Cairo Convention Center. Nabbing the top prize was Eventtus, an app that gives details about events taking place globally and also gives the chance for users to interact and comment about these events. Mai Medhat, CEO and co-founder of Eventtus, “knew that there were only a few applications that had the same idea as ours so we had to make it, and we also knew that we had to be the best at it.” The Eventtus team was awarded LE 100,000 for the application, which already has about 20,000 downloads and is growing in popularity. In second place was Hisham Bakr’s application “AIO Remote,” which allows users to remotely command computers and other android devices. Ahmed Fawzy’s “Revolution,” the first 3D game in Egypt, was awarded third prize. Samsung sees Egypt as a “potential market” and a “smart one too.” Their marketing team  Samsung are working to maximize the amount of advertising not to increase their sales, but to benefit from the bright minds that Egypt has to offer. “We are simply inspired by the Egyptian people and we think that their experiences and ideas will help us improve our product and our applications. We are not aiming to make money out of this event at all, and as proof all those applications submitted to our market will be available on the Samsung store for free” says Byungkook Min, HHP Team Business Manager. Sherif Barakat, Director of Electronics HHP Team, explains that, “The Entaleq initiative was created so that talented application programmers in Egypt would [have a chance to show their work].”  A total of 912 applications took part in the running, but only 15 applications were shortlisted. “We are also offering the top three winners the chance to attend the Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona, Spain,” adds Barakat. The remaining seven winners in the mobile apps category were Ahmed Elkaragy, Tarek Mansour, Muhammed Tawfik, Shady Wassef, Amr Ali, Shady Elyaski and Ahmed Awad. Moataz Abdullah came in the first place in the Smart TV apps category. The 17th Cairo ICT exhibition, this year taking the slogan “Building Bridges,” runs until next Thursday. For more information, visit www.cairoict.com.