TADHack 2016 coming to SA

MTN South Africa is bringing the international telecoms developer hackathon, TADHack, to Africa for the first time, from 14-16 October 2016. This means local developers can enter and compete against the best developers in 30 countries around the world.

TADHack South Africa will be staged at the MTN Innovation Centre, in Johannesburg, putting local developers in line to benchmark themselves against the best in the world, and stand a chance of winning prizes.

The Global TADHack challenge will see developers creating hacks using the global sponsors' resources. This year's development theme will encourage hacks in particular topics, such as BOTs, AI, IOT, enterprise communications, NFV, and open source contributions.

"MTN believes this is an opportunity for local developers to decode Africa, meaning we expect them to showcase Africa's ability to solving African problems. Local developers participating in TADHack 2016 have the capacity to debunk the misconceptions about a lack of developer skills in Africa. The platform will showcase Africa's capabilities within the app development space, highlighting our own creative thinking and the amount of knowledge and innovation that is based in our continent," says MTN CIO Benjamin Marais.

Developers can participate in two categories, namely Hackathon category and Showcase category. The Hackathon category allows developers to come up with new ideas or answer a sponsor's challenge, while the Showcase category allows developers to showcase advanced development or commercial products to put themselves in line for prizes and industry recognition.

With the support of its global sponsors, including MTN Business, IBM, Huawei, ZTE and Comviva, TADHack helps build the telecoms application development ecosystem from the grassroots. It also educates developers, non-coders, and enterprises on the power of telecoms app development; distributes best practices from those working in the field; and provides a pipeline of innovative services to the industry by promoting developers and vendor ecosystems.

"MTN is bringing this prestigious global event to South Africa for the first time, as part of our ongoing campaign to stimulate innovation and development capacity in the country. Through our ongoing developer and start-up engagements and support initiatives, we have noted the phenomenal innovation and development skills exist in the country, and we believe challenges like TADHack help to bring them to the fore," concludes Marais.

For more information, go to http://tadhack.com/2016/. Entries close on 23 September 2016.