NORTHERN Caribbean University students Joel Dean (left) and teammate Nicholas Brown (second right) are all smiles as they accept their prizes for winning the Digital Jam 2.0 Mobile Apps Competition with their innovative and crowd pleasing Pothole Positioning System Jamaica (PPS) mobile application.

The young men, who hail from from what is known as Jamaica’s ‘Silicon Mountain’ area in Mandeville, wowed everyone with their application that was created to assist drivers in identifying potholes on their journey and logging a hands-free report of it.

Sharing the moment are Group IT executive at Jamaica National, Shereen Jones (second left) and Flow Public Relations Executive, Nicole Campbell.

The Digital Jam 2.0 Marketplace and Job Fair was held June 28-30 at the Jamaica Conference Centre against the background that unemployment affects a large number of Jamaica’s youth and the global online world of business and employment presents unparalleled new job options. The virtual economy now offers new opportunities and solutions for entrepreneurs and Jamaica’s youth, such as using the internet to earn a living by performing paid tasks in the virtual economy.

Digital Jam 2.0 is also part of the Caribbean Growth Forum, a new one-year initiative led by the World Bank, the Inter American Development Bank and the Caribbean Development Bank, that brings together stakeholders from the private sector, academia, civil society as well as the Caribbean Diaspora.

The objective of the CGF is to identify policies and ideas aimed at inducing growth and creating jobs in the Caribbean through analytical work, knowledge exchange and inclusive dialogue.