Kainos Announces Winner of Prestigious AppCamp and Invites Applications for Summer 2013 Competition

Date posted
23 April 2013
Reading time
5 Minutes

Kainos Announces Winner of Prestigious AppCamp and Invites Applications for Summer 2013 Competition

[caption id="attachment_4964" align=" width="300"]Paul-Acheson Paul Acheson, winner of AppCamp.[/caption] London & Belfast, UK April 23rd, 2013 - Thriving technology company Kainos has today revealed the winner of AppCamp?, its acclaimed annual innovation challenge for university undergraduates. AppCamp, the largest and most dynamic event of its kind in Europe and highly regarded by the developer community, offers university students the chance to receive guidance and mentoring from Kainos to create and launch an app on the Apple App Store, and to take away the latest Apple devices. Paul Acheson, a Software Engineering student at Queen's University Belfast has been crowned the overall winner of the competition, which attracted over 100 applications in April 2012 from students throughout the UK. The winning iPhone app, Vacci-Nations, equips users with vital health information for travelling abroad, including the vaccinations that a user might need to obtain before visiting a particular country or region. Paul comments, 'Vacci-Nations provides users with access to relevant, up-to-date and most importantly, accurate health information. The app pulls its data from credible sources, meaning the user can be confident that the information they get from it is trustworthy.' Kainos invited eleven 'AppCampers' to take part in the competition last June and selected five students, who presented the most innovative healthcare app ideas, to develop them throughout the summer. Among the finalists' apps were Beta-Betes, Memory Manager, Acystant and CF Buddy, aimed at users with Diabetes, Alzheimer's disease and Cystic Fibrosis. As the winning App author, Paul was presented with an iPad Mini and an AR Drone 2.0 quadcoptor, and has been given a career developing opportunity to run the programme when it kicks off again this summer. Runners-up Andrew Paul and Sean Mackin also received an iPad Mini each, having won the 'Technical Triumph' and 'Community Collaboration' awards respectively. Commenting on the competition, Tom Gray, Chief Technology Officer at Kainos said, 'AppCamp continues to meet and exceed our expectations year on year, both in the quality of students that apply and the level of innovation that they bring. We gave the AppCampers a real challenge by applying a healthcare theme to the competition, and they delivered not only in their technical ability, but in their ability to understand users' needs and devise entirely new solutions to help improve their quality of life. I'm delighted that Kainos is at the forefront of this exciting initiative and can't wait to see what the students come up with this summer!' Registration is now open for the next round of AppCamp which is set to commence in June 2013, and Kainos is inviting first year developers and graphic designers to apply for a place on appcamp.co.uk. Plans are also well underway to launch AppCamp in London later this year.