Next Zim BarCamp coming up

COMPUTING

Zimbabwe’s tech community will hold its second BarCamp this Thursday, 6 September, buoyed by a $25 000 sponsorship with leading ISP, Zimbabwe Online (ZOL) for its Jumpstart Challenge.

The Jumpstart Challenge, which was rebranded from last year’s Start-up Challenge, will be held at the same venue, the Maiden Pub at Harare Sports Club, will be held alongside the BarCamp which will keep the tradition of discussion, demos and dialogue about tech issues in Zimbabwe.

Organisers said only 20 start-up will be selected to make presentations at the challenge, with the best 10 moving into the second round of presentations on Friday. A final five will then be chosen for final presentations at a date yet to be finalised for the top prize of seed funding and one year worth of internet services from ZOL.

The organisers also announced Econet as silver sponsors of the event, but details of their sponsorship package were not released. ZOL was recently purchased by Liquid Telecoms, a subsidiary of Econet.

“The disappointment for us is that the winners from last year’s event all seem to have lost steam and abandoned their projects which had promise. So this year we are only looking at start-up that have potential and people who actually want to push forward their projects. We will be making follow-ups and the judges will be quite strict on the operationalisation of the projects,” one of the organisers who declined identification told BiztechAfrica.

The judges' panel will be made up of David Behr, the founder and CEO of ZOL and Bester Zambuko, the founder and managing director of Adrenalin Advertising and Design Consultants. Other judges are Geoff Goss, who former regional director for Compaq Computer Group Corp with over two decades of experience in the technology markets of Sub Saharan Africa and Leon de Fleuriot de la Coliniere, the Chief Commercial Officer - Broadband at Econet in Zimbabwe.