THE competition followed a similar format to the Dragon’s Den TV show in which participants have the opportunity to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges. This year, more that 80 innovators from across the province submitted their entries, and ten hopefuls were shortlisted to pitch their ideas. On the panel were Dr Yaseera Ismail, senior lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal; Justice Matarutse from the eThekwini Municipality’s Economic Development Unit; Rodney Pillay, head of innovation and incubation at Derivco, and Siyabonga Gumede, portfolio manager at the Innovation for Local Economic Development at Technology Innovation Agency.
The top three pitches were awarded prize money to advance their concept or companies, and as a first ever precedence, judges unanimously selected a fourth winner. Sine Shabalala wowed the judges with her recruitment app concept and was awarded R15 000 to assist in the development of her solution prototype. The third prize of R25 000 went to Nomcebo Nzimakwe with her company, Sky Drop. The second prize of R35 000 was awarded to Khanyisani Buthelezi and his partners.
The winning app
This week, Berea Mail caught up with first-prize winner, Kalamoudacos, a part-time local, who divides his time between Johannesburg and Morningside. With a background in marketing, Kalamoudacos got a taste for tech when he tried his hand at programming. Now, he combines his marketing and sales skills with web development while his partner, Godfrey Maringa, specialises in app development. Kalamoudacos said his prize-winning app, Entrepreneur Suite, was inspired by his fiancée’s business.
“My fiancée works in the clothing industry and runs micro markets around the city. Sales are generally recorded through pen and paper, and customers usually receive a handwritten receipt. When customers started lining up to buy her goods, she dismissed the pen and paper and started taking card transactions. This is great for the retailer as they cash in on sales, but they don’t get to record information on how they performed at each sale. I thought if I could put a QR code on each item, each sale would be recorded and my fiancée could capture data on sales without having to put pen to paper,” said Kalamoudacos.
The app was further developed to include the QR code on the price tag of each item.
“The goal here is for the consumer to identify what each product costs while the entrepreneur keeps track of the items sold. It gets more interesting – if you are doing business on a reasonable scale, you’ve got to reconcile stock to keep track of your profit margins. Now that it is automated on the app, retailers don’t have to type everything into an Excel sheet at home – they can quickly see the profit margins. The hours they are saving – it’s amazing,” said Kalamoudacos.
Analysing retail data
He hopes to continue to develop the app to include suggestions for retailers to up their profits.
“When I looked at information coming through, I realised I could identify preferences at each market by understanding how each consumer at the location is positioned to purchase. We aren’t too interested in pushing these charts through to retailers because it can get complicated, but we are developing add-ons to share basic insights and offer suggestions,” said Kalamoudacos.
Partner, Maringa graduated from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, with a computer engineering degree. During his studies, Maringa’s primary focus was on Machine Learning and Computer Vision. He went on to work as a Product Development Specialist at a well known bank.
“Suite was designed with the client in mind, it was based off experience that we had in the retail space. The design had simplicity in mind. The goal was to make a process that is quite complex and filled with many steps as simple as possible. There was a big challenge in making the user experience as simple and intuitive as possible, he said.