Just after winning $45K at Netsquared: (Right to Left) Dieterich Lawson, Alex Harsha, Isaac Holeman, as well as the cast from the Extraordinaries, winners of the 15k second prize. Photo via elstudio.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Netsquared conference in 2008 with the featured project Squarepeg, and it was a wonderful experience. We didn’t take home a top cash prize that year, but I learned so much and met so many great people. So when I helped get FrontlineSMS:Medic started and we were in the process of meeting new people, continuing to explore our field, and looking for funding, I knew the opportunity to attend N2Y4 would be great. The community certainly didn’t disappoint. I feel like I am a slightly more thoughtful person for having had the pleasure of brain-storming, competing, laughing, eating, and drinking with all of you for this short whirlwind conference.

Our team also walked away from the conference with our first major organizational funding: the $25k top prize based on the Netsquared conference vote, the top $15K prize from the Microsoft Mobile Development Challenge, and a $5K social justice award from the French American Charitable Trust (FACT). Thank you, thank you, thank you, and THANK YOU!

For all of our friends who could not attend the conference and for those of you who attended and are (like us) still trying to piece together a flurry of ideas and experiences into a few memorable lessons, I’d like to share a few observations about why I think we were successful.

APT stands for Accesible Para Todos (Accessible For All in Spanish): Sasha from VozMob coined (I think) this tech acronym during his closing pitch, and I picked it up just minutes later during our closing pitch, using it to describe FrontlineSMS:Medic. What does APT mean for us? We’re working with a platform that is optimized for low-end and prevalent phones, that supports many roman and non-roman languages, and we’re trying to bring these tools to people who might not be able to access them without a little support… Read More