Apps that facilitate trade, eliminate red tape bag awards

MANILA, Philippines - Wireless applications that facilitate trade, check test papers, and improve the services of local government units (LGUs) eliminating red tape earned student-innovators and their respective schools about P1.6 million in prizes from Smart Communications Inc.

The Smart Market Assistance and Product Trading (S-MART) from students of Wesleyan State University emerged as champion of the Smart Wireless Engineering Education Program (SWEEP) Innovation and Excellence Awards taking home the top prize of P500,000.

The S-MART mobile application facilitates trade as it enables users to check the price of a particular product, calculate the distance to travel and fuel consumption as well as buy or sell products online.

The app tracks prices of basic agricultural crops allowing producers, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and retailers to maximize  their profit margins as well as consumers to choose the best buys in the market.

Students from Bulacan State University was first runner-up bagging a price of P200,000 through Smart IMAGE  (Instant  Multiple-option Assessor for General  Examinations) that solves short- to long-term problems caused by the conventional way of checking  examination papers.

The checker app that could be used for all forms of post-school tests with multiple-option based exams facilitates efficiency. It would allow teachers and members of faculty to allocate more time for skills development and student evaluation fostering stronger relations between the academe and the students or parents via records transparency.

On the other hand, Batangas State University’s #BAYANIHAN won second runner up with a prize of P100,000. The unified cloud-based application for LGUs intends to make government processes faster, convenient, and transparent reducing if not eliminating red tape.

The SWEEP Awards, the biggest and longest-running technology competition in the country, is a unique industry-academe linkage program that has a network of 52 colleges and universities all over the country.

Smart public affairs head Ramon Isberto said the goal of the partnership is to enhance Philippine engineering and information technology (IT) education at the same time help partner-schools produce industry-ready graduates.

“At Smart, we champion innovation especially among the students, encouraging them to identify consumer pain points within their community, think outside the box, and design game-changing devices or applications anchored on mobile-enabled technologies,” Isberto said.

Through the years, he added that Smart has seen the vast improvement in the quality of entries submitted for the SWEEP Awards and the increasing potential for commercialization of what used to be prototypes for college theses.

“These young innovators have effectively transformed the mobile phone into a tool that can be used to help solve everyday problems and needs,” he said.

With the theme, “Building Cloud-based Communities,” Smart’s SWEEP Awards continues to provide college students with the platform to develop and create innovative mobile applications that provide solutions to existing consumer pain points using mobile and Cloud technologies.