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Mocality, a Kenya-based crowd-sourced web and mobile business listings company, has accused Google of fraudulently stealing its customers. In a blog post today, Mocality's CEO Stefan Magdalinski maintained that Google has targeted its database, the core of its company, and lied to its users in an attempt to get them to join up with Google Africa's Getting Kenyan Businesses Online (GKBO) program.

Shortly after GKBO began in September, Mocality "started receiving some odd calls" from customers who were confused by pitches to build them websites that came from Google in apparent partnership with Mocality. There was no such partnership and Mocality claimed to discover it was Google lying to its customers to bring them into GKBO.

Google has released a statement which we have included at the end of the article after the jump.

A new study from Forrester proves that the majority of Americans are a bunch of lazy re-tweeters. 93% of online consumers in the emerging markets of China, India, Mexico and Brazil use social media tools at least once-a-month. U.S. and European consumers are far more likely to view social media as a spectator sport, joining it and then just watching it fly by.

In the U.S., 68% of social media users are "joiners," which means they maintain a profile on a social networking site and visit social networks. 73% are "spectators," or users who mostly just read blogs, online forums, customer ratings/reviews and tweets, listen to podcasts and watch videos. This number is strikingly similar in Europe (EU-7 countries, to be specific), with 69% of users classified as spectators and 50% as joiners.

When I sat down on my porch today to consider what 2012 might bring to the intersection of free speech and technology, I drew a complete blank. This is not because there are no precedents to consider. A quick glance at our free speech coverage for 2011 is a typhoon of changes and challenges.

Chief among these changes and challenges, the use of mobile and social technology in two related movements: the Arab Spring and #occupy.

The first GSMA Mobile Observatory report to focus on Africa has come back with some fascinating conclusions. First among them, Africa has passed Latin America to become the world's second largest mobile market.

The global mobile association examined the 25 African countries that account for 91% of mobile use (calling them the "A25"). Here are some of the most interesting of the report's conclusions.

Over several days, I visited three incubators in Nairobi devoted to startups in the social space. Given the emphasis in Kenya on mobile - as many as 60% of Kenyans pack mobile phones but as few as 5% have Internet connectivity via laptop or desktop computers - the development also focused on mobile, though not exclusively.

If in the United States and other more conspicuously developed countries nerds are considered rather ridiculous - right up until they're worth $10 billion - they are possibly even less well regarded in Kenya, where both government officials and the representatives of large companies largely downplayed their importance in the country's, and Africa's, future.

When people discuss "company culture," they usually do so in terms of employment or sales. How will the way this company has developed to solve problems affect my chances of successfully working for them? How will the timbre of their daily work influence the approach I take to sell to them? But in Africa, the company culture of three big tech firms continues to influence how they treat both an emerging market and the growing human resource they have to draw from in the continent.

I spent a day talking with leaders from IBM, Microsoft and Google about their operations and goals in Africa. We spoke in their offices in Kenya, increasingly important as a gateway to East and Central Africa, as well as to the content as a whole. It turns out that each company's culture has significantly tinted how each sees Africa, and how they operate.

It never occured to Simon Mwaura that, just because he wasn't Bill Gates, he shouldn't have a house like Bill Gates. So, using scrap metal, cannibalized parts and found wire, he built himself a Xanadu of his own in Nairobi.

The self-taught indie security consultant, who specialized in shop security for small businesses in the Kenyan capital, made his house fully mobile-phone controlled. If someone broke in while he was out, for instance, his house would send an SMS message to the local police. But most important of all his innovations was the tea machine.

In sixth grade, our class was given an assignment. Pick a country, learn about it, give a short talk and be able to answer questions. Also, fashion a placard for your desk featuring the flag of the country you've chosen. I chose Kenya. Why? It has lions and its flag is cool! (I'd remind you I was in sixth grade, but it has lions and its flag is cool!)

In the years since, I've realized that Kenya, and the other 45+ countries of Sub-Saharan African, have something else. Technology. Kenya's capital Nairobi is the capital of tech in East Africa. Unfortunately, the sheer weight of media imagery featuring charismatic megafauna and famine overwhelm any clear and nuanced picture of the exciting present and possible future of Africa. So I'm going to Kenya to see if I can't capture some small part of that bigger picture.

Driving from Nairobi Airport into Kenya's capital of Nairobi the evening of my arrival left me with this image: A four-lane highway that ends in a big pile of metal, street vendors and thousands of people sharing the street with all the other traffic, dented Disco Matatus, predominantly Asian sedans and pickups for the middle classes, construction workers joking around on the loading area of the huge grime-spewing rack-body truck that takes them home from work, and some rare sprinkles of brand new German limousines.

30 minutes later I'm crossing a floor-mat welcoming me with "there's no place like 127.0.0.1." It's this side of East Africa this brief report is about and which brought me here, to the mobile revolution I had only read about, and to the IPO48 event with its great bunch of start-ups:

What makes some technology so compelling and transformational that it thrives in a school setting and others languish? We've all heard stories of computers gathering dust in storage rooms while students and teachers everywhere have taken to photocopiers, calculators and, of course, cell phones.

One of my most surprising moments upon entering a very basic primary school in rural Ayenhyah, Ghana - a room with no electricity or running water - was being told that the school had a no cell-phone policy. Students have such a hunger for communication that they get their hands on a mobile phone by any means necessary. They keep them charged using the full power of their creativity, hooking them up to the small solar cell powering the community's medical clinic or latching them onto a motorcycle battery. Kids from Botswana to the U.S. to Zambia love to text.