Vodafone Foundation has been recognized for Community Contribution in the World Business Awards 2016. The World Business Award for Community Contribution recognizes organizations that implement initiatives that have a positive impact on the community and generate outcomes that have a long term benefit.

Vodafone Group Plc. is one of the world’s leading mobile telecommunications companies, with approximately 5.4 million customers in Australia. Vodafone established the Vodafone foundation in 2002 as a registered Australian charitable trust. The foundation is a Private Ancillary Fund, which donates funds to eligible charitable organisations to support public charitable purposes.

In 2013/14 the foundation adopted a new purpose alongside a three-year strategy to bring focus to the foundation’s charitable activities by utilizing mobile technology to improve the health and wellbeing of Australians. Inspired by platforms that allow people around the world to use desktop computing power to support research. The Vodafone Foundation partnered with the Garvan Institute of Medical Research to develop a program that allows smart phone users to donate their mobile’s computing power to assist with cancer research.

The three-year partnership involved an $800,000 grant and produced what has been called DreamLab, a virtual smartphone supercomputer that provides additional computing power to support important cancer genomic research. DreamLabs works by downloading tiny research problems onto smart phones from the cloud, solving them and then sending back the results to the Garvan research team. Whilst the individual contribution of a single phone is unable to solve larger problems, collectively the entire network has proven to be an invaluable resource. In addition to providing Garvan with free access to a crucial computing resource – saving the institute money and freeing up other compute resources for more research – DreamLabs also speeds up the pace of the cancer research itself.

Following the launch of DreamLabs in November 2015, the application has been downloaded more than 55,000 times, significantly increasing the pace of the research being conducted by Garvan.