Few days after splashing N10 million on Nigeria’s Got Talent Season 2 revelations, Robots for Christ, leading telco Airtel Nigeria today once more demonstrated its passion for talent discovery by rewarding a group of young Nigerians who excelled in the just-concluded Airtel/Google cloud app development challenge.

Jambite online prep school app fetched the duo of Aneke Chidindum and Nosa Harry Belvi the third position while Mapplusyou app secured Adewale Obadimo and Ayodele Adebayo the second place slot. The star prize of N1 million went to Femi Taiwo and Tunde Owokoniran with Funnyleni app.

The challenge, according to the organizers, was aimed at testing the knowledge of Nigerians and indeed Africans on how well they know the web, in various categories such as social & entertainment; education, business & non-profit.

While announcing the winners at Airtel Corporate Headquarters in Lagos, South-West Nigeria, Maurice Newa, Airtel’s Chief Commercial Officer, noted that the company is committed to discovering talent hence its decision to partner Google in the app challenge.

Said he: “The Google cloud development challenge was an initiative Airtel Nigeria identified as very impactful thus threw its full weight behind it because of our commitment to creating credible platforms for the development of local talents and also providing Nigerian youths with plethora of opportunities to succeed.”

Chukwuemeka Afigbo, Program Manager Outreach, Sub-Saharan Africa, Google, averred that “one thing Google hold dear is the importance of the web and the importance of the internet is the relevance of the web.” Afigbo observed that the importance of the app challenge was to encourage young Nigerians to get creative with the web and to encourage best practices amongst best app users. He noted that the winning apps were based on relevance to the Nigerian environment, originality and the responsiveness of the app to different screen-size phone, tablet or regular screen.

Aneke Chidindum, developer of the Jambsite online prep school app, explained that the idea behind the app is to create an avenue where web users can learn various subjects and assess one’s self instead of the usual social media which gets heavy visitors on a daily basis.

The 2nd and 3rd place winners were rewarded with N500, 000 and N250,000 respectively.

•Photo shows the winners, the Jambsite online prep school app developers, receiving their cheque . . . today at Airtel Nigeria HQ in Lagos.

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