Nadya Eka Lestari
TechInAfrica — Cape Town’s talented young tech gathered in Woodstock to share their ideas and their creations at the Red Bull Basement Hatch event. The Red Bull Basement Hatch brings tech enthusiasts, makers, creatives, designers, IT students, incubator managers, and funders, in one room together, talking about technology, coding and robotics, among others.
The participants debated, talked, showcased, networked, and upskilled each other, with the aim of connecting and building a better South Africa through the use of technology. RS Components South Africa collaborated with the event organizers, Red Bull and Geekulcha, by sponsoring components for the Maker Space corner at the event.
Brian Andrew, managing director of RS Components South Africa, said, “We at RS Components are passionate about education and nurturing the next generation of innovators. Events such as the Red Bull Basement excite us and we are proud to partner up with Red Bull and Geekulcha and look forward to future events where we can see South Africa’s tech geniuses at work.”
RS Components South Africa also staged a ‘Weather Station’ creation seminar at the event with the Xinabox team. Judi Sandrock, the co-founder of the STEM School Space Programme at XinaBox, said the session was great and very engaging, emphasizing the high level of makers that the Red Bull brand attracted that day.
“The insightful questions allowed everyone to explore how XinaBox delivers true IoT rapid hardware development, removing the barriers to participate in this exploding industry. Thanks to RS Components, enterprising innovators can build XinaBox solutions and get straight to coding,” she added.
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Sifiso Gcabashe, the social innovation manager for Red Bull, said that the main focus of the Red Bull Basement project was to give young people with excellent innovations to solve problems a platform to learn, create, and nurture their technical abilities.
“The Red Bull Basement brings together the community to share ideas as well as practicality so that we are not only talking about these innovations, we show what other people are doing. We have a big focus on women and we want to expose women doing amazing things in their communities and there are a few of them present at the event today,” he said.
He also added, “We also want to focus on the African continent because we feel that there are innovators in Africa doing absolutely amazing things and we want to expose those stories and innovations. We want to tell the ‘African Story’ and why this fits into the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
Mixo Ngoveni from Geekulcha and Red Bull Basement’s brand manager said, “Each event brings about something new, and the Geekulcha team and I are truly humbled to be a part of this movement. We in South Africa have a lot to offer the world in terms of innovation and technology and all we need is a platform such as this Red Bull Basement event. I would like to thank all who made the event possible and RS Components for always supporting our projects.”
The Red Bull Basement Hatch event left the participants inspired and ready to innovate in their various communities. The event also highlights the private sector’s commitment towards making a change and nurturing South Africa’s youth to harness their technical and computing skills for a brighter future.
Source: dataweek.co.za
