Two Qatar mobile apps win top award

Two mobile apps from Qatar were among the 40 winners selected from 451 nominations for the World Summit Award, the Ministry of Transport and Communications (MoTC) said in a statement.

The MoTC said the ‘WSA Mobile 2016’ “brought a diameter of innovation by choosing the best of the best from Mexico to Bangladesh, from Qatar to Germany.” The two winners were ‘Accessible Qatar’ by Sasol and the Arabic alphabet wheel, ‘Madar Al-Huruf’ by Qatar Foundation International, according to Gulf Times.

The 2016 WSA winners, the MoTC added, “demonstrated the richness and diversity of mobile content globally and proved how mobile innovation can improve society.”

The WSA is a global initiative within the framework of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), and is the only ICT event that reaches the mobile community in 178 countries. The WSA highlights digital content that helps improve society and focusses on local content with global relevance.

‘Accessible Qatar’, which won in the ‘Inclusion & Empowerment’ category, is a smart phone application that helps the ‘disabled community’ view and determine the accessibility of public and touristic locations and outlets in Qatar.

The information provided by ‘Accessible Qatar’ will encourage public establishments to make their premises accessible to all patrons. The MoTC said ‘Accessible Qatar’ will help promote Qatar “as an accessible destination.”

The Arabic alphabet wheel, ‘Madar Al-Huruf’ won in ‘the Learning & Education’ category. It matches English letters and sounds with their Arabic counterparts. The wheel gives new learners their first taste of the Arabic alphabet using engaging hands-on activities, in which users can transliterate proper nouns and their names while learning how to connect Arabic letters from left to right.

The app uses sound and also allows users to customise and share their names in Arabic as a digital sticker on social media.

The WSA winners were selected by a jury of international ICT experts. Each UN member state had nominated one product per category through a national pre-selection committee assigned by Reem al-Mansoori, the assistant undersecretary for Digital Society Development Sector at MoTC and the competition’s national expert.