Myanmar developer, Bagan Innovation Technolology’s Wun Zinn e-book app comes away the crowd favorite, wins Digital Winners Best App in Asia.

Written: 22 October 2015

Myanmar people love a good story – and there is no shortage of stories to tell there. Writers also abound, as do avid readers, but in a country with a nascent publishing industry, getting their stories to readers en masse is near impossible outside of the major cities. So the idea, sparked at Bagan Innovation Technology, was to connect writers with their readers in an online e-book sourcing, publishing and selling platform. They are also looking to scale up regionally – in Thailand and Malaysia.

“Every year, our businesses work with hundreds of young startups with good ideas around the world. So these startups who were selected to attend Digital Winners are the standouts of the standouts – and our congratulations go to the Wun Zinn team of Myanmar!” said Sigve Brekke, Telenor Group President and CEO. “Though we could only name one team Best App in Asia, we will stay connected with all of these companies as they build up and explore their potential.”

Said Ricky Thet Lynn Han, of Wun Zinn, in his immediate reaction upon winning the award, “This award is an amazing achievement and this gives us more energy to realise our visions going forward.”

“We have been working hard to take books to all Myanmar people as we have seen people outside the main cities cannot buy books because of poor infrastructure. We believe education is a basic right for people and enabling this through mobile is a great use of technology,” he continued.

The Telenor Digital jury chose Wun Zinn for its enormous societal impact on education at large (more than just the school system), access to learning, inclusion of all age groups and strong usability.

“This award to a Myanmar startup will boost inspiration and confidence to the developer community in Myanmar. As Myanmar is transforming at a rapid pace, Bagan Innovation Technology’s achievement will inspire the ICT industry of Myanmar to further innovate. With support from Telenor Myanmar at a local level, this will impact our country to a great extent,” says Sanat Pal Chowdhury, AVP and head of Value Added Service at Telenor Myanmar.

Asia’s cream of the crop

Telenor Group business units brought six Asian startups to Digital Winners – all winners of rigorous competitions in their local markets in their own right.

Bangladesh – Durbin by Durbin Labs won Telenor’s ‘Digital Winner’ Bangladesh apps competition. Durbin aims to make learning fun and deliver it at lower cost.

India – mTutor is an application oriented tutorial app that helps students to learn concepts of every topics of engineering. The content for the app has been created by professors from leading institutions and reviewed by professors from IIT and NIT’s. Apart from English and Hindi, the app offers options of Tamil, Telegu and Kannada languages as medium of instruction. M-Tutor allows students to get connected with other university students, leading faculties in the country and also potential employers.

Malaysia – Cytron Technologies is a local education startup that focuses on the engineering of robotic products complete with an open-source educational platform for robot enthusiasts to share and learn new ways of robot programming. Cytron has also built an online portal for users to train and share their codes with other robot enthusiasts, allowing them to explore new ways of programming. This makes robotic learning more intuitive and experiential.

Pakistan – The attendees to Digital Winners from Pakistan are Arusha Imtiaz, Asad Ullah and Hafiz Arslan Hafeez. They developed an app called My Smaced, a smart education ecosystem which connects homes to schools by bridging the communication gap between parents, teachers, students and the institute itself. In essence, it’s a dashboard that gives complete and real-time visibility to parents of how their children are performing at school.

Thailand – Two teams came in from Thailand: Tech Farm and GIZTIX. Tech Farm introduced Len-Nam, a water monitoring device for fish and shrimp farm’s owners who want to reduce the risk from uncertain water quality by real time data and proper solution. Len-Nam is easy to use and maintain as it is an all-in-one device. It can track the data 24 hours and also has real-time notification to alert users if any value is unsuitable for the animal.

GIZTIX, is an e-marketplace for worldwide logistics services; services include truck, freight and customs clearance. Their vision is to be the world’s centre for buying and selling logistics services for firms like Agoda does for travelers.