UC Berkeley Student Entrepreneurs Win Global Mobile Competition by Leveraging built.io
Team TouchFreight awarded Washburn Prize for Innovation for freight logistics mobile application
SAN FRANCISCO, March 10, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Last week, at the 5th annual University Mobile Challenge in Barcelona, Spain, a group of students from the University of California, Berkeley were awarded the Washburn Prize for their mobile application innovation, TouchFreight. Sponsored by built.io, the final round of University Mobile Challenge took place at The GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the world's largest exhibition for the mobile industry.
The University Mobile Challenge is an annual international competition organized by the Applied Innovation Institute designed to give students the opportunity to showcase their mobile innovation, prepare them for real-world competition and allow them to pursue their entrepreneurial journeys. Chosen among hundreds of university teams from all over the world who entered the competition, the most promising teams presented their mobile solutions to a jury of industry experts, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, accelerators and angel investors.
The winning group showcased TouchFreight, which provides a simple mobile logistics solution that modernizes how freight companies manage shipping. With its dispatch web portal and on board iPad application, shippers are able to:
- Dispatch shipments electronically and communicate in real-time with drivers
- Eliminate costly faxes and phone calls to drivers on the road
- Plan better routes and minimize re-routing
Team TouchFreight had originally built their app on an alternative app platform, Parse. However they quickly realized that their use case required the resilience and scalability of a platform designed for enterprise. The switch proved easy for the team and the migration took just a few days before the app was powered by built.io.
"Rather than reinventing the wheel by building a mobile backend for our app, we were able to focus on advancing our product and creating something of value in just six weeks," said Ryan Chapman, Co-Founder at TouchFreight. "built.io MBaaS gave us an edge by helping us deliver an advanced product for the competition."
"As a developer, you pick and choose what you want to know in depth, and where you can benefit from 'black box' features," said Eric Nelson, Co-Founder at TouchFreight. "For example, I didn't have to learn how push notifications work. With built.io MBaaS, notifications appear on the device with just a few clicks."
built.io is a repeat proud sponsor of the University Mobile Challenge, which includes teaching mobile app development fundamentals to student teams and mentoring them as they develop their idea into a concrete business plan. built.io also provides university staff and students around the world with a free, one year subscription to its mobile platform built.io MBaaS.
"We challenge students to find a real world problem and develop a fully functional mobile solution and viable business plan — all in one semester," said Ken Singer, Managing Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology at UC Berkeley. "built.io enables young entrepreneurs to jumpstart their mobile app development and reach the finish line with a full-featured, market-ready app in time for a worldwide pitch competition with potential investors."
"It was a deeply rewarding experience seeing these young entrepreneurs build a sophisticated, award-winning application on built.io," said Neha Sampat, CEO at built.io. "In just a few months, this impressive team already secured a customer and now, after the exposure of winning big at the Mobile World Congress, has a line of potential investors and partners knocking on the door."
About built.io MBaaS
built.io MBaaS is a multi-award winning mobile and web application development platform. By providing built-in enterprise app functionality, such as mobile notifications, geolocation, analytics, social integration and content management, built.io enables developers to deliver powerful apps in record time. built.io MBaaS powers the entire application backend -- servers, cloud infrastructure, database -- and has been proven to deliver worry-free scaling and reliable availability to Fortune 500 companies and startups alike. Learn more at www.built.io.
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