Tuesday 16 / December / 2025
Muscat: Omani woman Fatma Al Jabri’s idea for a bridal services app helped her team secure the first spot at the fourth edition of Sas48H, an application development competition hosted by the Information Technology Authority (ITA).
Winner takes it all
The app, Zfafy, which won a cash prize of OMR3,000, is designed to help women find bridal services in one place.
Talking about the app, Fatma Al Jabri, who was also in charge of marketing said, “During special occasions, many women have difficulty in finding wedding halls, designers, henna and makeup artists. We wanted to help them by designing an application that grouped all these services in one place.”
A total of 120 developers competed to develop an application in 48 hours, but Zfafy impressed the judges the most.
Salim Almutaani, team manager of Zfafy, spoke exclusively to Times of Oman. He said, “This came as a complete surprise to me. There were so many great ideas here today. Fatma did great work in choosing the idea and marketing the application.”
Previous winners include companies like OTaxi.
The app Twlefah won the second place in the competition and a cash prize of OMR2,000. This application helps connect providers of services and costumers through their platform.
Tough competition
While several team members already knew their teammates, there were some who met at the competition. Some of these teams even went on to win, take for instance the team of BitterTwitter that came in third and won OMR1,000.
Project Manager of BitterTwitter, Mohammed al Shanfari said, "Our team was formed on the spot based on the idea. We faced some difficulty at the beginning, especially with complicated programming aspects, but because we had two programmers we were able to pull through."
BitterTwitter is an app which "offers information about the reputation of entities and their services on social media," officials from ITA said.
Usama Letrash who was part of another team that got together at the competition said, “It’s possible to be strangers at the start of these 48 hours. Three of our members had known each other and competed once before, winning second place last year. [This year] we found our project manager and our idea was born.” Usama’s team came up with an idea for an app that provides promotional services and marketing campaigns.
Usama added, "This was a great challenge because of the number of amazing ideas, and [due to the fact that] only three of them could. Lots of ideas died because they didn't fit or because members couldn't apply them."
Ahmed Abu Dahab, a member of the jury and a Google Development Group Technical Lead in Egypt, said, "I was happy to learn that ideas from older editions of this competition became companies. I thought many of the [new] ideas were great and I look forward to see them being implemented."
The competition was organised by the Information Technology Authority and Bank Muscat to encourage start-ups turn their ideas into reality.
