Google Kenya Team of Joseph Mucheru (left) and Chris Kiageri (2nd left) in a meeting with SU staff.

Mr Joseph Mucheru, the Office Lead for Google Kenya and his colleague Mr Chris Kiageri on Monday, 25th February launched The Google Gadget Competition at Strathmore University. The two addressed the general student body in the auditorium.

They later met students interested in the competition at Suswa lab. The response of Strathmore students was very positive. Mr Mucheru said the competition is a brilliant opportunity for students in Africa in Kenya to explore and showcase their computing potential. He said there are many opportunities to work with Google in Kenya.

Mr Kiageri said applications being developed now will be used in the web and need to be cross platform because the web is platform independent. Eligible university students from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Ethiopia can design and build gadgets to win prizes. The winner will receive a $600 stipend. The next five other top students will receive a $350 USD stipend.

Gadgets are small, simple applications that run on web pages. There are gadgets for easy email access, gadgets for football results, and gadgets for fun. They're simple to develop, given some knowledge of HTML (and ideally XML and Javascript too).

And they're easy to distribute – through iGoogle™ (Google's personalised homepage), platforms such as OpenSocial™ and third-party websites. There are tens of millions of people who use gadgets globally, generating billions of gadget pageviews per week!

For more information on the competition, please visit: http://www.google.com/intl/en/events/eagadgetcompetition/

By James Sudi BBIT II