Armenian girls team stuns Google experts with sign language app An Armenian team of young women was selected among the finalists and won the People’s Choice Award in a months-long app-building competition, The Technovation Challenge, organized by Google at the company’s campus.

More than 11,000 girls from 103 countries formed teams to address issues in several categories: peace, poverty, environment, equality, education, and health. This week, the finalists traveled to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to pitch their ideas to a panel of tech leaders and other experts.

The Armenian team was comprised of Aghavni Hakobyan, Sona Avetisyan, Svetlana Davtyan, Violeta Mkrtchyan, Vardanush Nazaretyan, Google said in a blog post.

When a deaf classmate visited their school, the team of five girls from the village of Karbi, Aragatsotn village, came up with the idea for an app — aptly called Armenian Sign Language — to help people learn Armenian sign language using videos of sign gestures. Armenian Sign Language was developed to help connect those with poor hearing and those with good hearing. The app is suitable for English and Armenian speakers of all ages.

Four girls from Kazakhstan behind a safety app called QamCare were crowned the winner of the Senior Division and will receive $15,000.

Armenia, other finalists Kenya and India will receive $10,000 each.

The application Zangi created by the Armenian programmers may compete with global leaders and even exceed them in terms of personal data protection. Zangi enables to make video and audio calls, exchange interactive messages, photos and videos. Therefore, ensuring data security is of key importance.

The founder and general manager of the company, Vahram Martirosyan, presented their achievements in the field of security to PanARMENIAN.Net According to him, the app provides the users with several levels of security. First, the application data is stored in the phone only, and the company servers hold no other information.

“Our servers, of course, have specially designed layers of protection. But even if they are hacked, no data can be leaked. The data either passes directly from servers without being stored, or, in about 80% of cases, the mobile Internet IPs are connected directly, without even entering the server,” the team further explained.

The second level of security deals with the process of account registration, therefore aims to exclude the possibility of hacking any account. A competitor to Zangi, Viber uses SMS identification, if the user tries to access their account from another phone. In case of Zangi, the user is protected by a password, as the pin code sent through a message consists of four numbers, which makes it easier to hack the account.

“The third level of protection excludes the possibility of hacking data on the Internet. Zangi applies a special 2048 bit RSA-algorithm, while the flow of bits of information being transferred from one point to another, is tangled by another algorithm. Even of the flow is hacked halfway, it will be impossible to decode the mass of bits,” Zangi team added.

They also mentioned that the app does not depend on a single country or area, and there are servers in Armenia, the Netherlands, Russia, the United States: it is a whole cluster system. If a country decides to block the application, no problems will arise, since it will automatically be served by the nearest servers. The company is registered in Singapore, whose legislation also provides a high level of protection.

Armenian girls team stuns Google experts with sign language app (video)

Armenian app Zangi provides high level of data protection