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Red Bull Basement Hatch showcases Cape Town’s tech talent

23 October 2019 News

Cape Town’s brightest young tech geniuses gathered in Woodstock in September to share their ideas and their creations at the Red Bull Basement Hatch event. The Red Bull Basement Hatch brings together tech enthusiasts, makers, creatives, designers, IT students, incubator managers and funders, in one room. Here they debate, talk, showcase, network and upskill each other, with the aim of connecting and building a better South Africa through the use of technology. RS Components South Africa partnered up with the event organisers, Red Bull and Geekulcha, by sponsoring components for the Maker Space corner at the event.

Students getting their hands on creating some tech at the event.

Brian Andrew, managing director of RS Components South Africa, said that these events truly add value to the youth of the country. “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,” he said.

RS Components South Africa also hosted a ‘Weather Station’ creation seminar at the event with the Xinabox team. Judi Sandrock, co-founder for the STEM School Space Programme at XinaBox, said the session was great and very engaging, underlining the high calibre of makers that the Red Bull brand attracted on the 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.

Sifiso Gcabashe, the social innovation manager for Red Bull, said the main aim of the Red Bull Basement project was to give young people who had created amazing innovations which are aimed at solving problems in their communities or wherever they may be working from a platform to learn, create and nurture their technical abilities.

The RS Components Weather Station session with the XinaBox team.

“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.

Gcabashe also added that these projects focus on technology and innovation. “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 that these events have shed much needed light on coding, technology and innovation to not only the youth but for everyone keen to learn something new. “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,” he added.

The Red Bull Basement Hatch event was a day filled with technology, coding and robotics, leaving 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.


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