Rachel Tan Straits Times 29 Apr 13;
CAR-POOLING may not be new, but developing it into an online application to help mothers with children in primary schools is a prize-winning idea.
Parent Pool won first place at the first Government-led hackathon, which ended at the National University of Singapore yesterday.
"We wanted to look for a user group in Singapore which had a strong identity. So we picked the mums of primary school-going children," said 26-year-old co-founder Titus Seah, who works at PUB, the national water agency.
Parent Pool is an online programme that allows mothers to meet and assist one another in car-pooling kids to school. This service can save fuel and cause fewer traffic jams, said Mr Seah, who met the other two co-founders, Mr Anthony Chow, and Mr Chan Haoyee, both also 26, at Stanford University.
In the long run, the three hope the application will also build stronger community ties.
"We found out that parents want to get to know one another before their kids get into school," said Mr Seah after speaking to parents and teachers.
Parents of Primary 1 children are the key targets for Parent Pool as they need the most assistance when their children are starting school, Mr Chow said.
"I think the hackathon mentors helped us a lot because one of the key things was finding out what drives people to change their behaviour," added the SingTel data scientist.
The three men won $5,000 to further develop their app with the support of Samsung technologies.
The National Environment Agency (NEA) conceptualised the Clean and Green Hackathon last year.
About 170 participants - some as young as 17 years old - took part in the three-day forum, which started last Friday. Developers, professionals and students met to explore and create new eco-solutions through mobile or Web channels.
"More and more, you find that environmental problems are multi-faceted, so apps are able to address a few issues," said Ms Sueanne Mocktar, deputy director of the corporate, NGO and marketing department of the 3P network division at NEA.
