Holy iCow

The Apps4Africa event has wrapped up, and the winner has the most charming app name I've ever heard: iCow.

Apps4Africa, as you doubtless recall, is the State Department sponsored program to fund local development of innovative apps to empower people to solve problems in their own community.

The winner? iCow. It's a program to track the times when your cattle are, well, ready for gettin' it on.

I certainly would not have thought of that.

Another very clever innovation - it's entirely voice-based. In largely non-literate societies, text based solutions could freeze out most of your potential target market.

Contests like this are not a silver bullet (what is?) but they're a great way to encourage people to jump into this space and come up with some creative ideas that would never have emerged in a State Department conference room.

Now to really make a difference the apps will have to get into the hands of the people who can use them. That's a distribution problem and a marketing problem, but I'd imagine it's also particularly a technology problem. I don't know what the penetration of smartphones is among illiterate dairy farmers, but it's probably not that high - yet.

With standard adoption curves and the incredible decreases in technology cost, I imagine smartphones, iCow, and even more clever and locally useful apps will be in everyone's hands in the next 5 years.

The list of winners is here. Here's Secretary Clinton's speech congratulating them: