CAIRO: The third annual Business Plan competition in the Information Technology (IT) sector took place Tuesday under the auspices of the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology. The whole idea of the competition is for anyone with a creative idea in IT, Internet or mobile phone technologies to present it. If the idea wins, we help him create it, said Ahmed Gomaa, CEO of Ideavelopers, advisor to the Technology Development Fund and the main organizer of the competition, during a press conference at the Cairo International Conference Center. The competition is divided into three main parts, said Gomaa. In the first phase all candidates present their ideas. Only 30 of them are short listed, 10 from each category (IT, Internet and mobile phones). The 30 candidates are then enrolled in a 50-hour course in the American University in Cairo (AUC) to learn how to create a professional business plan for their project. In the second phase they present their business to a committee made up of university professors and managers of big established IT, Internet and mobile phone companies, for further screening. In the third phase, three candidates are chosen from each sector to attend another 20-hour course at AUC where they learn presentation skills. And finally the nine runners up get to present their projects in front of a committee for the final awards. The first winner gets LE 200,000, the second LE 150,000 and the third LE 45,000, Gomaa said. Gomaa indicated that the prize money has increased since the first year. We started with LE 60,000 and then LE 100,000 and this year we are offering LE 200,000 as first prize. Gomaa believes that the financial reward is not everything. What is more important is that we provide a fully equipped office for the three winners at the Smart Village bring their projects to light. We also get big companies in their field of interest to sponsor them for a year or a year and half. Mustafa Khouly, assistant professor at AUC who won second place at last year s competition, said at the conference that he had benefited a lot from the courses he took at AUC and the time he spent in Smart Village to work on his project. Khouly, among a team of six, is currently working on creating a new mobile phone software enabling users to get directions to any location around Cairo. The service will provide a map to the user to link him to any place he wants to go to from his current location, Khouly added. Khouly has also stated that the first year s third place winner has now started his company Khayal (Arabic for imagination) and has created the first Egyptian computer game. Gomaa told The Daily Star Egypt that the competition s main aim is to promote new ideas and help develop them. It is not concerned with whether the innovated service will be applied in Egypt or exported to the international market. The competition is sponsored by AUC, Telecom Egypt, EFG Hermes, and ITWORX along with the Information Technology Industry Development Agency, Technology Development Fund and the Ministry of Communication Information technology.
