Cash Up: New Irish Tech Heroine

We’ve got #WebSummit fever. First we woke up early Monday to get our networking prep on with three women who know the tech industry better than most. Yesterday we watched with admiration as Eva Longoria proved she was more than a Desperate Housewife with her talk on philanthropy drawing praise for its discussion of gender. And today Ellie had us desk soldiers super envious with her recap of Day One of the (wifi-less) Web Summit. However, the inspiration is never-ending this week. We just learned about how an Irish team, including two young women, developed the world’s first connected self-counting cash register yesterday at the Web Summit and PCH International Hardware Hackathon.?Cash Up were awarded first prize in the competition for their innovative prototype of a cash register which counts the money inside itself in real time and uploads that data to the cloud. Swit swoo?

Here’s a pic of our actual winning prototype from?#hackdublin yesterday?#websummit pic.twitter.com/eT6DNUVKr4

? Aoife Crowley (@aoifacrowley)?November 4, 2014

The idea was inspired by market research that found one nightclub on Harcourt Street spent a total of eight hours a day counting cash from tills. That’s the equivalent of the nap time we’re meant to be getting every night. Cash Up worked out that this labour was costing up to €30,275 in wages annually. Cash Up’s solution is a web connected till drawer with the ability to count the cash it contains in real time. It uses optical technology and force-sensitive resistors to keep track of the cash as it comes in and out of the till.

Aoife Crowley of?Wishbone Studios and events company?Made It managed the product design and user experience – talk about a career heroine. And the concept of a self-counting till was first pitched by another Irish woman, Pauline O’Callaghan, an electronic engineer working at UCD. After working through the weekend with 11 strangers, Cash Up walked away with the top prize Monday night. Pauline is currently planning to move forward with developing Cash Up as a product.

We’re starting to re-think this whole journalism-as-a-career thing now?

Follow Jeanne Sutton on Twitter @jeannedesutun

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