Nigerian application, Form+, wins Google Apps Developer Challenge

The application, Form+ was today awarded as the winner of the Google Apps Developer Challenge for the Enterprise/Small Business Solutions category in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The aim of the competition was to give software developers in Africa and across the globe an opportunity to show the world what they can do with the Google Apps and Google Drive platforms. The submission categories were:

●     Enterprise / Small Business Solutions

●     Social / Personal Productivity / Games / Fun

●     Not-for-Profit: Education / Water / Food & Hunger / Health

L-R: Bolutife Ogunsola, Willie Aniebiet, and Michael Adeyeri with Emeka Afigbo, Program Manager, Google. The three University of Lagos students won $20,000 in the Google Apps Developer Challenge for their application called Form+

while participating developers were divided into 6 geographical regions namely: Sub Saharan Africa, Latin America, Middle East/North Africa, South East Asia, India and a sixth region that comprises the rest of the world.

The winning application, Form+, provides an interface to create application forms by just dragging and dropping components. The user can therefore create forms – such as curriculum vitae (CV) or résumé submission forms for businesses and coursework submission page for lecturers – that were previously not supported by the Google Docs platform.

The Form+ software developer team of University of Lagos students; Bolutife Ogunsola, Michael Adeyeri and Willie Aniebiet, who are one of 3 out of 15 winners across the world made up of only students, received Chromebooks and $20,000 collectively. As students of tertiary institutions they also won an additional grant worth $18,000 for their school’s department.

Emeka Afigbo, Program Manager, Google stated that “our expectation is that the this motivates more (young) Nigerian developers to develop apps that change the way we live in Nigeria and Africa at large.”

This competition is the latest in a series of programs that Google has been holding across Africa to increase the quantity and quality of locally developed software applications in the region. For more information, please visit the Google Apps Developer Challenge Website: http://www.google.com/events/gadc2012