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won by Mr Allister Banks of Remote Livestock Marketing System (RLMS).
The second prize went to Nimbuss’ Taps Murove, who presented a crowd sourcing application and the third prize went to Footballzone, all the way from Bulawayo, that came up with a local soccer update portal.

After closely following the ZOL Jumpstart Challenge, which ran for two weeks, I sought to get an insight into the initiative.
I caught up with TechZim founder, who is also one of the Jumpstart directors, Mr Limbikani Soul Makhani Kabweza (LSMK).
Tonderai Rutsito (TR): Congratulations on the successful hosting of the second Jumpstart Challenge. I’m sure our readers want to know what Jumpstart is and who is behind it?

LSMK: Jumpstart is a community-driven initiative headed by Clinton Matambo,  Tatenda Furusa, Brad Searle and myself.
We started off by initiating a bar camp last year, which was a success and we thought why not create something that will benefit and promote upcoming local talent.

TR: Jumpstart seems to be more of a private entity, we are not seeing other relevant stakeholders chipping in. Do you intend to run it as a purely private event?
LSMK: We have been putting so much emphasis on successfully hosting the event and we do not want to make noise about our future plans lest they do not materialise.
We believe in action and if you want to know more about us, you will look at what we have already done. We are creating something that has value to the community.

These guys are committed, we are seeing lots of commitment from the participants who have been with us for the past week.
These people are serious about what they do and that is why we have excelled from last year.

TR: You are growing tremendously.Recently you were part of Hackathon that was organised by Alpha Media. Can you tell us more about that?
LSMK: Yes, Alpha Media approached us, they appreciated our work and asked us to come up with a list of participants and we managed to come up with 29 contestants that came and battled it out.

TR: Will this not work against you in future, where you get to have contestants pitching up for specific competitions only? Will it not also kill the community spirit within them?

LSMK: When people see value they connect, when there is no value they won’t connect. For example, you can’t attract programmers to a designers’ activity, so it is up to us to create something that has value for them.
TR: Awards are definitely good incentives but don’t you think these are shortlived as the local talent requires more support to develop?

LSMK: We are now going way beyond that. We need to know what problems the contestants are facing and offer them support and not just awarding them prizes and letting them go.

Execution is not an easy issue for the start-ups, we are creating a mentorship environment with industrial experts who are successful entrepreneurs.

TR: Let us talk about last year, what happened to those startups who took the top prize and what have they been up to since then?
LSMK: The winner was Mugela, they built an engine that would be integrated with hotels via Internet to manage advance bookings.

TR: That was a noble initiative, where are they now?
LSMK: They needed to get more money, they had to go and strike some partnership deals. They also needed money to cater for some serious expenses, imagine advertising a  hotel in Vumba, you cannot do that from Harare, you will need a camera and to visit the hotel to get some photos too before we even talk about designing the engine.

TR: So there was not enough support?
LSMK: In 2011, we did not offer mentorship and follow-ups, we are learning from those shortcomings and this time around we are offering much more support.
TR: Were the teams that did not make it last year eligible to enter this year’s challenge?

LSMK: Of course, they were, you know when you fail the first time and come back again, it shows confidence.
When someone drops something and opts for another, they would be admitting to failure but when they come back it is a show of determination to succeed and our judges were also excited to have some of these guys coming back. We had a group that came back and we were keen to find out how they had polished their product.

TR: Your panel of judges is made up of successful industrial entrepreneurs. What criteria did you use and how many were there initially?
LSMK: We did a lot of work to settle for a judge before we even approached one. We had to ensure that chances of them saying no were low, so eventually we went straight for our top targets and they all said yes.

TR: You are the only dominant technology startup in Zimbabwe, the tech world is quite enormous, why are you just talking about mobile-based application? Don’t you think it’s an opportunity for you too to spread your wings into other areas of technology which are lacking attention like designing, hardware, networking, etc?

LSMK: We think we do not have that capacity, it’s not a financial issue but a focus one. If we spread wide without the necessary capacity we won’t be able to achieve what we are targeting.

We would like to be laser focused. We had to look only for an area which has technical experience, one which we fully understand and can assess, we are actually planning to continue focusing on these two areas, the mobile and web applications.

TR: So why these two in the first place?
LSMK: There are huge opportunities for innovation and driving revenue within the established area, the mobile telephone and Internet have created a huge opportunity for various players. Recently, I interviewed a lady who sells airtime in bulk and imagine she is selling at least 4 000 juice cards daily getting about

US$4 500 every month, these are the opportunities created by the mobile telecoms industry.
TR: Come to think of it, most ICT professionals are not even getting that kind of money every month. What is the take here?

LSMK: These revenues are not coming from the mobile companies, this is new money, there are lots of streams that can be used to get money out there. We have football, social networking, question and answers and many more.

The writer is a computing specialist with TechnoMag. Email: [email protected]/ [email protected]