Congratulations to St John Ambulance NSW

The Vodafone Foundation is pleased to announce St John Ambulance NSW has clinched first place in its App Aid charity challenge. The charity has been provided with a $30,000 donation which it could use to further develop its 'Responder App' - a smartphone app to support volunteers when responding to emergency situations.

Oz Harvest claimed second place in App Aid with its pioneering app to help tackle food waste in Australia. The Vodafone Foundation provided the charity with a $10,000 donation which it could use to further develop its ingenious app, allowing restaurants and cafes to notify OzHarvest when they have available food for rescue in real time.

St John Ambulance and OzHarvest were two of ten charities short listed for the App Aid challenge, which connected charities with volunteer App developers. Participants were tasked with the daunting challenge of building an App from scratch in just 48 hours.

And if the task of designing and building an App in two sleepless days sounds overwhelming, try then having to front Silicon-Valley heavy weight and former chief evangelist of Apple, Guy Kawasaki, in a Dragons' Den inspired pitch, as part of the unique charity initiative.

All ten participating charities rose to the challenge of pitching their App prototypes to the team of judges. The charity apps presented ranged from facilitating donations, fostering volunteering, entertaining seriously ill kids and finding homes for pets, with Guy Kawasaki praising their achievements.

The Vodafone Foundation team are so happy with the results of our first App Aid event, all the teams that participated were so passionate about their cause and worked together with the developers to produce some incredible results in such a short amount of time.

Thank you to everyone involved to make this such a success and watch this space for details on our next event!

L to R: Tom Horn, Jason Maclalich, Eric Tam, Adam Dill-Macky, Ilan Lowbeer from the St John Ambulance App Aid team.