‘AMPLUS’ smart ad display software wins Jaffna-based YGC
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The YGC Season 4 winning team, Bit Masters
“AMPLUS”, an innovative smart ad display software, has been crowned the winner of the 4th edition of the Jaffna-based Yarl Geek Challenge (YGC), which is organised by the Yarl IT Hub in conjunction with the Lankan Angel Network (LAN). This follows the paticipation of 16 teams in the initial, three-day YGC hackathon, which was later whittled down to six finalist teams vying for top honours.
According to a statement, “Season 4 of the Yarl Geek Challenge (YGC), organised by the Yarl IT Hub, concluded with team Bit Masters winning the 2015 challenge for their innovative advertising platform. ‘AMPLUS’, as it is called, provides innovative software for smart ad displays to help vendors better understand and reach their audience. Team Titans earned the runner-up award for their GPS-based bus tracker, ‘FindMyBus’, while team Gideons was the second runner-up for their speech translation app, ‘Collaborator’, a notable attempt to solve language barriers”.
Further, the statement also revealed that LAN investors would now act as “mentors and provide the expertise, knowledge and guidance needed to set up and accelerate viable start-up ventures. The remaining YGC finalist teams were also encouraged to re-evaluate based on the feedback given and pitch their ideas directly to LAN at a later date. The next few steps for the teams would involve taking a closer look at their business model and fine-tuning it with the guidance of their LAN mentors, and securing funding through the angel investor network”.
Additionally, the statement also quoted the winner of last year’s YGC, Prasanth Subendran, as commenting, “Being selected at YGC Season 3 last year, we were able to pitch to LAN investors who found our business idea interesting. They mentored us along the way and, ultimately, we were able to start our own company, Techkitez. With the funding we received, we have now launched our service, BusSeat.lk, and are looking forward to becoming the No. 1 online bus tickets booking platform in the country”.
(JH)