Revolutionary communications company Serval, joins Dev4X in Global Learning XPRIZE competition

New York City, September 22, 2014

Dev4X is leading a community of technology developers and education experts to develop an open source platform to autonomously teach children in the most challenging environments to read, write, and perform basic numeracy within 18 months. This effort, called the Moonshot Education Project, aims to provide a 10X improvement in the education of the world’s poorest children, to reach a billion children in the next 10 years, and to do so at a 100th the cost of current approaches. The Serval Project team is delighted to be joining forces in collaborating with Dev4X on this project and to enter the newly announced Global Learning XPRIZE which is perfectly aligned to this project's mission.

The XPRIZE have always strived to make the impossible possible and have tackled some of the world’s grandest challenges by creating incentivized competitions for teams around the world to pursue. This includes private spaceflight, 100 MPGe cars, oil-cleanup technology and most recently, competitions to go back to the Moon, address ocean acidification, and revolutionize healthcare.

The Global Learning XPRIZE is a $15 million competition to create Open Source software that will autonomously teach children in the most challenging of environments to read, write, and perform basic numeracy within 18 months.

The Serval Project team will be creating a custom version of their revolutionary mesh networking software to work with the Dev4X platform. It will allow many educational functions to operate and provide some significant additional benefits. A large number of communities that will utilize this education software live in areas that lack communication infrastructure, are within conflict zones, or disaster areas. The Serval Project software will provide these communities the ability to phone, message, and communicate with one another for free on a decentralized network.

“We’re excited to join the community of people working to solve these challenges and are delighted to be able to assist Dev4X. We strongly feel that communications should not just be for the geographically, financially otherwise fortunate, for it is the unfortunate who need it most.”, said Paul Gardner-Stephen President of Serval Project Inc. and Senior Lecturer at Flinders University.

The Moonshot Education Project community that is coming together, is perfectly positioned to take part in this competition. “Communication is something we in the developed world often take for granted, but is a vital resource that is lacking in most of the communities that will use this educational software. Providing a free communications network will greatly add to the transformative value of this project.” Said Bodo Hoenen Founder of Dev4X. With collective experience working on this problem for many years and some of the most amazing minds from varied backgrounds —like those from Serval, we can tackle this problem in a unique open community approach.

“The XPRIZE has inspired some of the most daunting challenges to be overcome, and this challenge is truly world changing” Hoenen said, “It does not matter who wins the competition, what matters is our children’s future. That is the real prize!”