PIVOT East Champions

The PIVOT East, East Africa's Premier Mobile Startups Competition and Conference took place at Sheraton Hotel Kampala last month. The event saw five winners from the five categories of the competition.

In the Mobile Society Category, the winning group was the Kytabu team. This team built a Textbook Subscription Application where users can access text books on a low cost tablet. The application is flexible in that a user can choose to pay hourly, daily, monthly or yearly. The user can also choose to pay for a page, chapter or even buy the whole book. This means that more people can have access to textbooks.

SleepOut.com came out winner in the Mobile Enterprise Category. This Web and Mobile platform connects travellers and tourists to hotels and other suitable accommodation areas. The web platform has a vast numbers of accommodation options along with details about the place. It also allows the user to make a booking. In addition to that, the site also gives the user a map with directions to the place. This is revolutionizing the tourism market in East Africa and will help to put more of these hotels and accommodations suites online.

The MATATU Android Game came topped the Mobile Entertainment Category. The game was developed by one of the resident teams at Outbox Uganda, Kola Studios.  Matatu is based on the popular Ugandan card game. It brings all the features and rules from the widely physical game onto the device. Players can also compete with each other over the internet and also play against the phone. Matatu is available on both Android and IOS.

Go Finance Company Ltd won the Mobile Finance Category. The company supports different businesses, mainly MSMEs. They provide this support by lending working capital to distributors in value chains of multinationals. They also provide training to equip MSMEs with relevant business knowledge such as book keeping, and give business intelligence to these companies, helping them create business plans and better ways to plan their budgets.

The team that won Mobile Utility Category was M3Route. This is a mobile, Web and SMS Platform that helps users with information they need in order to for them to get from one place to another with ease. The team seeks to expand their platform to cater for the whole of Kenya. They allow different transport service operators to advertise on their website at a monthly fee. You can check out their app from the play store.