HACK TO GO

Mobile paves way at inaugural TADHACK South Africa, Papi Mabele tells the story.

SMART MOBILE DATA-MEASURING APPS and geolocation as an address for informal settlement residents may have got people talking at South Africa's inaugural TADHACK telecom application development hackathon, but in the end a rather more basic need took the $1 000 (about R15 000) prize money. The winning app enables cellphone users to pay for public transport using their airtime.

The aptly named Mobimoola app is designed to work in a taxi or any other public transport mode. It uses USSD (see sidebar) and could be installed on smartphones or feature phones to wirelessly transfer payment to taxi operators. Mobi Moola's developers – Bertin Jacobs, Sydney Chadwick, Jonathan Pearl and Stefan Scriba – said the challenge they sought to overcome was a common one for many South Africans.

“When paying minibus taxi fares, people often find they don't have cash on them, or they don't have the exact change needed. We considered current payment platforms to make payment easier, but then we realised that more people had SIM cards than bank accounts in South Africa. So, we decided to use existing mobile technology to allow them to use their mobile airtime to pay for taxi transport,” says Jacobs.

Presented by MTN South Africa and in partnership with ZTE, IBM, Huawei, Mahindra Comviva, Tata, Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Integr8, csg international, Wipro, Dell, EOH and EMC, the weekend-long TADHACK marked the local leg of an international event. After two days of coding, caffeine and creativity, a panel of high-profile judges judged the innovations for creativity, readiness for market and technical quality and the South African winner joined international teams in competition for a R5 million ultimate prize. Unofficially, the battle continued as the teams saw their pitches being live streamed to the remainder of the global TADHACK events.

Most intriguing of all was the uniqueness of some of the applications and solutions that emerged from the combined efforts of 64 developers encompassing 12-hour hackathons at MTN'S innovation centre. Truly deserving the closer attention of South Africa's

WHAT IS USSD?

Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, USSD for short, is a cellphone protocol also known as “Quick Codes” or “Feature Codes”. Used to send text between a mobile phone and an app, its applications include prepaid roaming and mobile chatting.

IT community, noteworthy contender apps featured ideas for bitcoin-based economy for robots, app-based emergency response solutions and even digitised book- and inventory-keeping for SMMES.

The three runners-up were quite innovative in their own right. l GEASY, by Robert Sandell, which is an energy monitoring solution using MQTT and Mobile IOT through Ubuntu. l SLACKERS, by Rafiki (Umar Dockrat, Thato Sebesho, Shoaib Ebrahim Khan, Nevin Moodley, Werner Geldenhuys) can potentially relieve the load on customer care by using AI to answer a host of questions – much like Facebook's messenger bots, but accessible through USSD. l ZITHA, by Nndavheleseni Tshivhase, an accounting app for small businesses that can also be used as a marketing tool.

Most commendable participant was 13-year old Girlcode winner Naledi Phafane from Pretoria. She looked at the problem of residential addresses in overpopulated and rural areas, where it is difficult to locate a home and deliver a package. The method uses cellphone tower signal triangulation to establish a person's place of residence. Through her solution, dubbed Pandora, companies and service providers will be able to track location and address changes and eliminate the need for proof of address. Naledi also recently won the City of Ekhurhuleni hackathon for her Open Robot solution.

Could you eat a bicycle?

A BICYCLE? ONE BICYCLE? What is this? Amateur hour? A Frenchman named Michel Lotito, nicknamed Monsieur Mangetout (“Mr Eat Everything”), reputedly polished off 18 bikes – along with seven TV sets, a couple of beds, a half-dozen chandeliers and an entire Cessna 150 light aircraft over the course of his 57 years. Lotito, who died in 2007, was afflicted with a condition known as pica, in which people – due perhaps to zinc or iron deficiencies, genetic quirks, or various intellectual dysfunctions – are driven to eat things that are not commonly recognised as food. Like shopping trolleys. Lotito ate 15 of those. (If you're curious, he'd hack the metal into manageable chunks and lube his throat with mineral oil to help the stuff go down.)

Lotito's death was attributed to “natural causes,” whatever that might mean in the context of a man known to consume as much as a kilogram of raw metal a day, but it's clear that eating a bicycle is not something medical experts would consider, you know, “a good idea”.

“If you eat a bolt or a nut off a bicycle, you aren't going to digest that and break that down,” says Wayne Fisher, a researcher who studies pica at the University of Nebraska Medical Centre in the USA. “It will either stay in your stomach or in the gut somewhere and if you're lucky it will pass out through the stool.” But beyond indigestible metals and hardware, modern bicycles may comprise all manner of plastics, petrochemical-based lubricants, carbon and glass fibre, rubber, Kevlar, epoxy and other potentially toxic or hazardous makeshift comestibles, which are likely to lead to problems of their own, Fisher says.

So listen: we understand. Bikes are delicious and lord knows the upcoming holiday season is always full of culinary temptations – but, please, for your own good, try to resist. Have some milktart instead. design, is especially sensitive to those frequencies, which some have argued are comparable in pitch to the warning screeches of primates, though others dispute any such connection. In the end, we suppose, it doesn't really matter why the scraping of fingernails on a chalkboard sends us up a wall. Just don't do it when we're around. Ever.

TEST NOTES

Hisense’s upscaling is quite good, but definitely better served in animation. It doesn’t deal with sudden motion well, leaving a motion blur aura around the edges of people. Football (soccer) was especially bad. Keep the resolution native as far as possible.

TEST NOTES

Battery life is pretty much exactly five days, which is great because Fitbit has designed an entirely new proprietary charger. Interchangeable bands are quite expensive.