Sliide Airtime has been named as the World’s Most Innovative App at the Global Mobile World awards, dubbed the ‘Oscars’ of the global telecom industry, beating off strong competition from big-name (and big budget) apps from around the world.
The awards comes just weeks as Sliide prepares to launch in South Africa and Pakistan to help users earn free airtime – and discover new content.
According to Corbyn Munnik, CEO and founder of Sliide Airtime: “What an honour for myself and the Sliide team. This is proof yet again that Africa can produce innovative companies that can change the world. We are now raising funds to expand into additional markets; there’s a lot more to achieve as we continue to expand and scale up our offering.”
Sliide’s competitors are Unlockd and Buzzvil. Unlockd is live in Australia, the US and UK and backed by a number of high profile investors in Australia including Lachlan Murdoch. Buzzvil is headquartered in Korea and has users there as well as in Japan, Taiwan and the US.
However, Sliide was designed specifically for emerging markets taking into consideration the large barriers to app usage including: poor internet connectivity; older, smaller and slower devices and a user-base who are less accustomed to using apps in their everyday life.
The app sends personalised news and stories from national and international publishers as well as sponsored content and adverts straight to the lock screen of phones. Sliide uses 65% of its advertising revenues to buy mobile data from MNOs to give to its users – who can then earn more airtime by completing tasks such as answering surveys from brands.
The 2017 Affordability Report published earlier this month by the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) writes that: “Over 4 billion people are still offline today —most of them women, most in developing countries, and most because they cannot afford to connect”. The report says that to buy just 1GB of data in Africa costs an average citizen nearly 18% of their monthly income.
Following its launch in Nigeria in March 2016, Sliide made an immediate impact, with every single one of its users continuing to receive free airtime every month. Advertisers including Unilever use Sliide because it gives them a now-proven mobile advertising channel.
Last year at the AppsAfrica Innovation awards held during AfricaCom in Cape Town, Sliide Airtime won the prestigious title of Best African App, beating off competition from more than 200 submissions from 25 countries.
It was also named as the Most Effective Consumer Smartphone App at the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards in London, “Mobile Marketing Company of the Year” at the annual Nigerian Telecom Awards and winner of the Game-Changing Innovation category at the West Africa Com Awards.
