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.

Mocality did some pretty deep forensics on their traffic and discovered a specific IP, which used a Kenyan ISP and utlized the latest Chrome build, was extensively accessing their business listings. So on December 21, they re-directed a percentage of the inquiries from that IP to a page that gave a different phone number - one that connected to the Mocality call center. The calls that came in were startling.

Here's an example, a call from someone identifying himself as Douglas, from Google Kenya, who tells the person who answered the phone, whom he believes is a business owner using Mocality, that Google and Mocality are collaborating on a new website service. Another call, available here in transcript, has the speaker accusing Mocality itself of fraud. They estimated the team identified as Google Kenya made 20-25 calls per hour to Mocality customers.

After a Christmas break, Magdalinski said there were no more instances of access from that IP. Instead, a new trend started from an Indian IP which belongs to Google. The calls began again, but this time from India. Here's an example, starring a caller named "Deepthi."

"It looks like Google has now outsourced the Getting Kenya Businesses Online operation to India!" wrote Magdalinski. He continued:

"When we started this investigation, I thought that we'd catch a rogue call-centre employee, point out to Google that they were violating our Terms and conditions (sections 9.12 and 9.17, amongst others), someone would get a slap on the wrist, and life would continue.

"I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on 2 continents."

We contacted Joseph Mucheru, Google's senior lead for Sub-Saharan Africa. We met and interviewed him in October in his office at Google's Nairobi headquarters where we talked, among other things, about the GKBO program. We have yet to hear back from him. We also contacted Magdalinski. If either respond, we will update this article.

Forbes reported that Google's policy manager for Africa, Ory Okholloh, said the company would make a statement by the end of the day. It is the end of the day in Kenya and all we have been able to get is a boilerplate line from Google's corporate PR department.

"These are clearly very serious allegations, and we are doing everything possible to investigate them."

Other publications, including The Register, have carried a different statement.

"We're aware that a company in Kenya has accused us of using some of their publicly available customer data without permission. We are investigating the matter and will have more information as soon as possible."

Clearly, Google is looking to shift the focus onto the fact that the information in Mocality's database was user generated. However, as Magdalinski notes on his Twitter account, "The real issue is not taking 30% of our 'publicly available db' - it's what was said to our customers on the calls."

UPDATE: Here is the statement from Nelson Mattos, Vice-President for Product and Engineering, Europe and Emerging Markets:

"We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality's data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We've already unreservedly apologized to Mocality. We're still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we'll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved."

As Matt McGee notes on Marketing Land:

"The statement doesn't specifically say that Google itself was doing the scraping and attempting to contact Mocality's customers. By saying 'a team of people working on a Google project,' Google keeps open the possibility of placing responsibility for the incident on third party contractors - which is similar to what happened last week when Google said that ad agencies were responsible for a poorly-executed sponsored blog post campaign for Google Chrome."

During my conversation with Mucheru in October, he spoke of GKBO as a Google program, conducted by the Kenya office he oversees, and not by a contracted group. If this was inaccurate, I hope he will correct it in his response to ReadWriteWeb's questions.

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.

Only 24% of U.S. users are content creators and 36% are conversationalists. Those numbers are quite similar in the EU, with 23% classified as "content creators" and 26% as "conversationalists."

In Asia, these numbers look drastically different. Seventy-five percent of online adults in metropolitan China and India create content, which includes publishing blogs and web pages, uploading video and audio/music they made and posting articles or stories that they wrote.

Japanese social media users do not follow the same patterns as Chinese and Indian social networkers. A mere 28% of Japanese users visit social networking sites at least once a month. Only 13% of online Japanese adults visit Facebook on a regular monthly basis. Instead, they prefer sites like mixi or Twitter, which fit their preference for online anonymity.

Emerging Social Mobile Markets: China and Africa

Another Forrester report proved that China and other Asia-Pacific countries led the pack in mobile adoption, including mobile social usage and work usage. They were also more likely to own multiple devices. This report showed that in metropolitan China, 33% accessed social networks via mobile, whereas only 25% of U.S. users and 11% of European users did the same. Forrester's report revealed that Chinese users accessed social sites the most, calling them "super connecteds."

This study does not include social network usage in Africa, which is only second to China. Toward the end of last year, Facebook partnered with French cell operator Orange to bring inexpensive cellphones armed with Facebook to Africa and Europe.

Facebook is available in 70 languages, and more than 75% of its users are located outside the U.S.

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

When it comes to the Arab Spring, the Internet was turned off in Egypt for only the second time in history for an entire country. Then the country's imperial president was turned out and joy erupted all over the Middle East and beyond.

That story went back and forth so many times there is simply not room to recount it all here. It currently rests teetering on a knife's edge between a fall back into tyranny and a rough drive out and up. Technology will feature in it, but exactly how and to what end is unknowable and, in my case, frankly unimaginable.

If it were a movie, it would be a thriller.

#occupy

When it came to the Occupy Movement, it has been said lately that it's gone global and that it's done so by traveling along the backbone of the Internet. It might be more accurate to say that Occupy is the Western iteration of the Arab Spring, adapted to "first world" nations' worries - like the money-fueled corruption of the political process, the bankrupting of the people by their financial institution, the use of religious and cultural rhetoric to wage war...

You know. Western stuff?

If it were a movie, it would be kitchen-sink realism.

Africa

If there were a single thing I feel confident in predicting, it would be the increasing importance of Africa. Although I had been interested in, and had written about, Africa for several years, my trip there this year, the opportunity to see the vibrant Afro Nerd Superstar entrepreneurial culture with my own eyes, opened me up viscerally to the energy and opportunities on the continent.

And mine were not the only eyes from which the scales fell. Others included Wired and Forbes.

As I wrote in the article that concluded my Technotransect series:

"Sub-Saharan Africa is a region with 1 billion people, over 60% of whom are under 30 years old. High tech has been a primary driver of East Africa's 40% growth over the last decade and small and medium-sized enterprises are poised to take over a great deal more of that growth going forward, according to a recent study. Anyone who is not paying attention to the continent, and paying attention to it as a forge, not just as a market, is going to swell the ranks of the "if I had invested $100 in Apple in 1981 I'd be a billionaire" crowd. I fear that the government itself, as well as the large tech companies so avid for the continent's growing purchasing power, may be among them. But that won't matter to the Afro Nerd Superstars. They've got things to do."

If it were a movie, it might just be a Horatio Alger story.

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.

That is hardly to say that government interest in such a top-heavy country as Kenya is unimportant to these groups, it just seems they have little hope of great support anytime soon. And, instead of despairing, they have all created different ways of reaching out to, and beyond, Kenyan society. In fact, one of my primary impressions was how these developers, as focused as they are on their own markets and the needs of their own society, are nonetheless well versed in global development issues and best practices and are in constant contact not just with each other, but with their peers and with corporations as far flung as Finland and the Silicon Valley.

iLab Africa

My driver Johnson looked around the parking lot of the iLab on the built-out campus of Strathmore and shook his head.

"I never even knew this part of the campus had been built," he said. "You know this university? If you're smart, you can get into the University of Nairobi. But this place is for the elite."

It certainly had its share of Biffs and Betties. No one was wearing old jeans and cast-off t-shirts, that was certain. The iLab building itself was so new that it would be two more weeks before the rest of the furniture was in, according to Dr. Kerretts. The cube-shaped, multistory building had the openness and clean lines of a Scandinavian furniture store. There was none of the rotting brick and peeling paint you saw at the U of N. In fact, the whole cost of the building had been furnished by Safaricom and is full-on fiber-equipped. Samsung and other international high-tech firms have donated money, materials and expertise to the lab. But any fear that the iLab was a function of a new high-tech colonialism was quickly put in the ground.

"They have come to ask us to explain African markets and consumers to them," said Kerretts. "The I.P. of any product or application developed here is retained by the student or faculty member." The sponsoring companies can offer to license an app created at the lab, at favorable terms to the developer, but control is retained, she said, by the developers themselves. There is no liberty without owning the fruit of you own mind.

I sat down with three students at iLab - all of whom must be Masters candidates - to review some of their projects. All the projects were mobile apps, three focusing on medicine and one on housing. I asked why there was such an emphasis on social good, instead of, say, entertainment.

"Our teachers tell us, 'focus on the needs of your society,'" said David Owino, a well-turned out grad student clad in a pressed purple dress shirt and loafers. Quick to smile but very focused, David was the de facto spokesman for the trio, which consisted, in addition, of John Kulova and Sammy Onkoba. "But it's also about the market."

You want to make cash, I suggested.

"We want to make money, too, for sure."

It's a significant step toward parity for African developers to be solicited for their own intelligence and intellectual property and for they themselves to set up a situation in which they retain the I.P. they produce.

Owino is currently shopping his app, a mobile-based pharmaceutical sales tool, to investors. The sales proposition is easy.

"We'll sell it to large pharmaceutical companies," he said. The tool avoids fraud by GPS tracking the sales staff and sending all orders immediately to the company's database. No one can pocket cash or claim expenses for a trip to Mombasa they never took. Customers can be assured of reference to their orders with a phone call.

Next page: iHub

iHub & m.lab

If a Western geek knows anything about East African developers, it is probably in terms of iHub. Set up in March of last year by Erik Hersman and others involved in the creation of Ushahidi, it takes up most of two floors in the pleasant multiuse Bishop Magua Center on Ngong Road in Nairobi. The space is light with tall windows, balconies that let out over a sea of feathery acacias and open working space. The space was secured and renovated with funding from the Omidyar Network and Hivos, the lease is covered by Ushahidi and the Internet connection provided by local company Zuku.

Memberships are offered in color. White is virtual, green is resident and red requires a fee of $100, securing the member a reserved work space. Members are offered business mentoring, Internet access, the cross-pollinating presence of their fellow nerds and access to events and speakers. The events include barcamps (one of which ended while I was on the plane to Nairobi, unfortunately) and hackathons. The latest was focused on water resource issues. iHub speakers have included Google's Marissa Mayer and Vint Cerf.

Perhaps the most important ingredient in the iHub recipe is Pete's café located inside the space itself. Pete's coffee, which he roasts himself, is sick.

On a separate floor sits m.lab east africa, the go-to-market side of iHub. Graduates of iHub whose developments seem the most marketable are offered residence there, for at least six and no more than 24 months. One of these is the Kuyu Project, which we've written about before. Simeon Oriko of Kuyu and John Kieti, manager of m.lab, said m.lab gives developed projects a chance at financial viability. The University of Nairobi, the World Wide Web Foundation and eMobilis work with iHub to sustain the World Bank-funded lab and its fellows.

m.lab provides subsidized office space, access to otherwise expensive market intelligence, business advising services and application testing services.

Nailab

Nailab, led by Sam Gichuru, is just across the hall from iHub. Built on the Y Combinator model, Sam invites startups to compete three times a year and the winners are given space, connectivity and mentoring as they try to build their apps and find their markets.

"We can't offer our residents money," said Gichuru, "so we offer them space and access to excellent business knowledge." Some of the residents have used that to make their own money. One group of animators was practicing world-class motion capture but Gichuru advised them to create more basic, but still stylish, animations for corporate clients. In the last six months they sold ten animations at $2,000 each.

"We are very concentrated on markets," Gichuru said.

Another resident, Nyatha Githinji, had designed an app, SchoolsSMS Premium, that allows parents and school administrators to communicate with one another. The app covers school fees, attendance, sick days and more. So far he's sold it to half a dozen school districts around the country and has amassed enough data from those trials to provide any potential user with proof of concept.

He also won a $2,500 prize from a development contest, ipo48.

"Here in Nairobi, that means he, as a single guy, can afford to pay rent and eat and do nothing but work on his product for three months!"

Nailab also offers more advanced-stage developers and startups with space and connectivity.

DIY

I can't speak for the nerds I met and the nerdatoria I visited in Nairobi. But I can tell you what I saw and you can take it from there.

In a country with a disproportionate government sector, where a legacy of colonial control has made that government slower and less responsive than it could be, startup-minded propellerheads have no choice but to act. Well, they could wait around for government help, or, if they're well connected, they might be able to mine those connections. But even if they're plugged in, most nerds don't want to yoke their wagon to an ox that slow, regardless of the power he brings to the plough. So they are seeking alternatives. And they are finding them.

Lone-wolfing it, creating and joining incubators, exploring alternative funding sources, both international and domestic, connecting directly with a global market, and setting up public-private partnerships are all things I've seen the Nairobi nerdoisie do, all while focusing on their own needs and their own markets. This urge to seek new avenues to success is part of the reason, along with a culturally entrepreneurial mindset, that there are so many of them and why they are going to be a big deal in time.

Sub-Saharan Africa is a region with 1 billion people, over 60% of whom are under 30 years old. High tech has been a primary driver of East Africa's 40% growth over the last decade and small and medium-sized enterprises are poised to take over a great deal more of that growth going forward, according to a recent study, anyone who is not paying attention to the continent, and paying attention to it as a forge, not just as a market, is going to swell the ranks of the "if I had invested $100 in Apple in 1981 I'd be a billionaire" crowd. I fear that the government itself, as well as the large tech companies so avid for the continent's growing purchasing power, may be among them. But that won't matter to the Afro Nerd Superstars. They've got things to do.

Update: Kresten Buch, the founder of IPO48, wrote to say that Tusqee had received a 25,000 Euro investment from Buch's company, 88mph.co.ke

Photos by Curt Hopkins | Disclosure: the reporter's airfare and hotel were paid by the Republic of Kenya

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.

IBM was the only company that gave us a presentation during our meeting. The presentation, riddled with typos, was nonetheless almost painfully professional. It listed assets and plans and platitudes. It focused on the past, specifically, Africa's. The meeting, carefully planned, more mannered than polite, was also overstaffed, with four people representing the company.

IBM was depicted in an introductory slide as being present in Kenya since 1959. In reality, they were in Kenya for a couple of years before leaving for almost six decades, to return only in 2009, once the election violence was well and truly past. Their presence was maintained in the interim by sales representatives. Now they staff a full-fledged subsidiary office.

Charles Munyororo, Global Technology Services Leader for IBM East Africa Ltd., and Vincent Njoroge, Global Business Services Leader (I still have no idea what those titles mean), took us through the set of slides.

The long and short of it (mostly long) was that IBM is a firm believer in an Africa made up of refineries, mines, ports and governments. For IBM, this suits its strength as a large-scale, well-entrenched firm with a focus hardware and consulting. The realities of African tech strengths and needs were touched on by, but seemed lost on, the company.

One of Kenya's best known social web innovations is a bankless mobile money transfer system, called M-Pesa. M-Pesa, although allegedly developed independently, was subsequently managed by Vodafone affiliate, Safaricom. IBM now runs it for Vodafone. It is popular because banks have very little to do with the way it works, person-to-person. Most users will never interact with a bank as long as they employ it. Since most Kenyans, and most Africans, do not have bank accounts and credit cards, M-Pesa is a popular product. IBM, however, plans to develop bank-specific payment tools so that all the banks people aren't using can, as Njoroge put it, recoup the fees they aren't getting from the people who are using M-Pesa. Good for IBM and its customers, possibly, though it is hard to see the gain for M-Pesa's existing customers.

As we took our leave, I asked Mr. Munyororo whether IBM had a relationship with the de facto geek HQ of East Africa, iHub. "No."

IBM's agreement to manage the large African mobile provider, Bharti Airtel, will make it a mobile player for some time to come. But its apparent disdain for the rich ecosystem of geeks in its midst may indicate a time of difficulties to come when its tech equivalent of a resource extraction economy falters.

Microsoft

Microsoft's General Manager for East and Southern Africa, Louis Onyango Otieno, met us in an office with a lengthy boardroom table that would have not been out of place anywhere from Osaka to Redmond. In fact, nothing in the room would have led you to the conclusion you were in Africa aside from Otieno himself. As General Manager for East and Southern Africa, Otieno has led the software company's efforts in the region in recent years.

"What I'm most proud of," he said, leaning back in his padded chair, "what I hope I'm remembered for, is our localization of all of Microsoft into Kiswahili." Kiswahili, an Arab- and Bantu-based lingua franca for East Africa, is Kenya's national language. Microsoft agreed to a project that would allow everything from software help copy to the Windows operating system itself to be expressed in that tongue.

Otieno created a list of 3,000 tech words that Kiswahili did not already have - CPU, web browser, Windows - and assembled a group of linguists and charged the latter to translate the former. They did so with great pride, he said. It was their, and his, legacy, and a formidable legacy for Microsoft in Africa.

One gets the sense after talking with Otieno about Microsoft, that the company is under no illusions as to the importance of the market, which is 1-billion strong and is assiduous in its work toward understanding and appealing to it. Nor do they underestimate its capacity for growth. 40% of Africa's people are currently under 20 years old. That is a huge growth market.

There is also an effort made to welcome African interns and high-performing graduates into the company. Clearly, Microsoft is paying attention to its customers and to the culture (and language) of its future customers. How much are they learning from Africa however is impossible to say. Focus is still, in Africa no less than Redmond, on Microsoft's successes, namely, its operating system and its Outlook business suite. But the former is 30 years old and the latter debuted well over a decade ago.

Google

One of the things I asked the representatives of all three companies I visited was how the African tech landscape would look in five years. Specifically, how would Africa enter the world's tech consciousness on a big scale?

Both IBM and Microsoft demurred. But Joe Mucheru, Google's regional lead for Sub-Saharan Africa, launched right into his vision of the region with no reservations.

"It won't be five years," he said, leaning forward in one of Google's small conference rooms in Nairobi. "I don't even think it will take two." In Mucheru's future, Africa's contribution to the social web will be in the creation of a "social labor marketplace." In much the same way that eBay enabled a globalized individual marketplace of things, Mucheru believes that African geeks will help to create a similar marketplace for labor.

"Africa needs more jobs than it can import," he said. With a distributed one-to-one and one-to-many marketplace, the growing number of increasingly educated African youth will be able to sell their skills - coding, translating, journalism, piecework manufacturing and assembly, whatever it might be - on a worldwide market at the rates it will bear. This, he believes, will mark the beginning of a new kind of marketplace, used by both sellers and buyers of work around the globe, and it will bear the unmistakable mark of its African developers.

Google is counting on the African developer ecosystem to make its market work, but it is still focusing mostly on nurturing the market and not as much on nurturing the contributors. Its current push is to get all local and regional businesses online, using Google products. It is donating expertise in training and materials such as computers to local universities.

Mugu Kibati, Director-General of Kenya's Vision2030 program, described Kenya's government as "grateful" for the company's decision to locate its primary Africa office there, despite the 2007 election violence. Google has placed a long-term bet on Africa in general and Kenya in specific, Kibati said Google officials had told him. They see Kenya much as Kenyans do, as a place with ups and downs but whose overall course is straight and fruitful.

Despite the Googleness of the offices I visited, those working there were nonetheless far more formally dressed than their counterparts back home. One resident journalist remarked that Kenyan businesses were unfailingly professional and "procedural" than an analogous workplace in the States. This is in part a function of the formality the country's inherited from its colonial British overlords upon declaring independence in 1963. In fact, Kenya's former president Daniel Arap Moi was nicknamed "Nyoya," or "footsteps," as in, people should follow in his, with alacrity and a minimum of fuss. Those who didn't wound up in Nyoya House, the basement of which was famous for its torture chambers.

Kenyan business places are hardly torture chambers, but they are stiff and that stiffness may not put them in as good a position as they could hope to be in, so that they might quickly shift and catch new currents in the continent.

Qui Bono?

But the workplaces of giant tech companies may not, in the long run, be where the business of the nation is conducted. In a later story, I will examine Kenya's entrepreneurial geek culture and the private organizations that incubate them.

The "corporate culture" of these three big high-tech companies has not changed with its change of scenery. I suspect it is much the same for Cisco, Samsung and the many others currently lighting out for, or landing in, Africa, with its increasingly educated and gradually more affluent consumer base. In fact, they are as likely to change Africa as much as Africa changes them, unless, of course, the real engine of Africa's growth is found somewhere else, in, say, the native expression of an international constant: nerd love.

Otieno photo via Nairobitech, other photos by Curt Hopkins | Disclosure: the Republic of Kenya provided the reporter's airfare and hotel.

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.

As Dr. Kamau Gachigi, director of the University of Nairobi's Fab Lab said, "Some day, when Simon is a millionaire, that tea machine will stand proudly in the lobby of his building."

After seeing Mr. Mwaura's home on the local TV news (see video below), Gachigi pulled in two of his students and pointed at the paused picture on the screen, showing Mwaura in front of his large, makeshift circuit board, about the size of a kitchen pantry.

"Go to the TV station," he told them, "and don't come back without that man." Now Mwaura has been brought into Fab Lab. With student help, his pantry-sized circuit board is now contained on a single computer chip.

Gachigi heads up the MIT-allied Fab Lab, as well as the University of Nairobi Science and Technology Park. The Fab Lab, like its global counterparts, is one in a network of hands-on high-tech construction facilities, allowing students, faculty and the public to create working prototypes of high-tech, and low-tech, ideas. It also serves as a business incubator and an applied technology, marketing and sales consultancy. The network as a whole is operated according to an open source ethos. Every partner lab is obliged to share new innovations with the network and any lab may build anything another has as a prototype.

"Necessity is the mother of innovation," said the professor, "and ours is a value-added culture."

This "value-added cuture" is so much a part of the Kenyan sense of self that it
has a name in Kiswahili, "jua kali." (In English, "hot sun.")

So far the Fab Lab is incubating 17 small companies. One of them was built off of the MIT Media Lab's innovation, a Wi-Fi amplifier built of locally-sourced materials, in Nairobi's case, plywood and chicken wire. By bending the plywood in a certain way and attaching chickenwire to the concavity, rebroadcasting towers can be created that extend the reach and power of Internet connectivity.

Dr. Kamau Gachigi, director of the University of Nairobi's Fab Lab, and staff

The local "estate," or neighborhood, of Mountainview, has had a 13-month trial serving 10,000 people. Three students manufactured and implemented the system for their senior project. They formed a company to re-sell the Internet connection and the Fab Lab has helped them find seed money and advised them both on the technical and marketing elements. The same system is already in use, as a going concern, upcountry around a store and school complex.

It's important to remember, and Kenya has reminded me, that technology is not the exclusive domain of eggheads, or even propellerheads. The word itself comes from the Greek for "to make" and making is one of the essential urges of the human spirit.

Don't worry. I haven't drank the Kool Aid. There are plenty of obstacles here in Kenya, in the region and on the continent that continue to militate against the success of technology in improving people's lives and in nudging the human family toward some sort of elemental parity. I will cover those as well, as the series progresses. But finding people with the desire and ability to create, with the insistence on making regardless of the resources available, is not one of those obstacles, as Kamau Gachigi, Simon Mwaura and the Fab Lab demonstrate.

Photo of Mwaura's tea machine courtesy The Standard, tea cup photo by thesaint, photo of Gachigi and students by Curt Hopkins | Disclosure: the Republic of Kenya provided the reporter's airfare and hotel.

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.

What's Tech About Africa?

Africa in general, and Kenya in particular, has turned its liabilities (the abiding lack of infrastructure, a surfeit of young people and persistent economic challenges) into a strength: a hard-to-rival mobile entrepreneurial culture.

But the only image that came to my aunt's mind when she found out I was going out to Africa was of the Masai. When I stopped by the St. Vincent de Paul to donate some clothes and got to talking to the attendant, he asked, "What's tech about Africa?"

The Republic of Kenya and the many government and non-profit groups, businesses and entrepreneurs focusing on tech in the country want to change this. So while in country I'm going to have the opportunity to speak with Kenya's Information and Communications Permanent Secretary, Dr. Bitange Ndemo; members of the ICT Board of Kenya; Mary Kimonye, CEO of Brand Kenya; Mugo Kibati, Secretary General, Vision 2030. I'll also have access to Africa executives from IBM, Google and Microsoft, and to executives from Kenya-based Safaricom, Zuku, as well as academics from Strathmore University and elsewhere.

I'll also visit the site of the new 5,000-acre new tech development park, Konza Technology City, and the iHub tech and business incubator, which I'm really looking forward to.

If you'd like to read about Kenya's vital and entrepreneurial tech scene here are some of the stories I've written about African technology.

Africa is gigantic (see graphic above) and multifaceted. A story about Kenya can no more represent all of Africa than a story about Moldova can stand for all of Eurasia. But Kenya is, in fact, an African country and examining it will give you a sense, a hint of the obstacles and promise of the continent as a whole.

As this posts, I am flying to Kenya. Over the next week, in the TECHNOTRANSECT series, devoted to the present and future of African technology, I hope to be able to give you some pictures that counter the notion that the continent is a cross between a game park and a slum. It is my suspicion that Africa in general, Kenya in particular, will figure heavily in the whole world's technological future.

Kenya Backgrounder

Click here for more of our extensive continent-wide African technology coverage.

Kenyan flag photo by Kevin Walsh | True Size of Africa graphic by Kai Clausen via Information Is Beautiful | Disclosure: the Republic of Kenya provided the reporter's airfare and hotel.

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.

Simple Machines

I've been thinking about simple machines a lot recently, while in Africa working in education. You probably remember simple machines from elementary school science. They're the basic building blocks of mechanical technology, from the inclined plane that helps move equipment easily from one height to another, to the pulley that enables everything from hoists to the modern bicycle, to the wheel. Simple machines are technology at its most elemental form. Think of a bike climbing a hill and you can see all of them working together gracefully; imagine a dump truck and you see how they allow us to create the tallest buildings and the longest highways. Without them, we'd still be carrying water in pails.

Technology helps us advance, but in education it has often been a source of false hope, peddled by people who promise to revolutionize learning. The problem often is that the technology ignores the basic configuration of any classroom in any school: the triangle that connects students, teachers, and ideas. My experience is that technologies that reinforce the relationship between those three poles represent opportunities for stronger classrooms and better education. But those that interrupt that relationship stall and ultimately fail.

E-readers are a fascinating example of a technology seems to be working in the developing world. At a very basic level, having an e-reader is equivalent to having a set of books at hand. Happily, even in schools with only the most rudimentary learning tools available, both teachers and students are well-versed in the importance of books and the ideas within, and readily recognize the value of having great access to them. This represents an enormous improvement over the status quo, where access to books is extremely limited: Botswana, a country the size of France, has fewer than 10 bookstores, and the village library of Kade, Ghana, is nearly empty of books. Imagine for a moment the power represented by e-readers: Students can walk around holding a library of books larger than all those in the bookstores and libraries of their country. It's a device that is bigger on the inside than on the outside, like Dr. Who's Tardis or Harry Potter's charmed tent.

The e-reader satisfies an important core need, providing access to the books of the world at a moment's notice. And it does so in a way that's accessible to both students and teachers, strengthening the bonds between them rather than disrupting their relationship.

The Price Point of Literacy

E-readers have something else going for them as well that is critical in an educational setting: A declining cost, even as the amount of content available increases. Numerous organizations are quickly digitizing the world's books, including local textbooks and storybooks. There is an enormous and growing variety of books available inexpensively or for free, from open-source textbooks like those from the CK-12 Foundation to public domain classics like the works of Jonathan Swift or Miguel de Cervantes. Meanwhile, the devices themselves are relatively sturdy, work well outside, and their costs are declining almost daily. (Their singleness of purpose also helps: it's very hard for a teacher to compete with the pull of Facebook or the call of Twitter.)

Perhaps most of all, e-books in the developing world are an example of leverage, a word inspired by another simple machine. Cell phones have paved the way for book and other content delivery as well as for recharging, not to mention helping million of children learn how to take care of and use a small device with a keyboard and screen. Publishers are going digital fast: Amazon has famously reported that it now sells more Kindle books than paper books, and 75% of John Grisham's newest thriller are sold as e-books.

The cost to donate e-books to the developing world is essentially zero, and might even represent a way to create a new market of readers in a generation. The early results we have seen using e-readers in Kenya and Ghana are very promising, with children spending up to 50% more time reading than before the introduction of e-readers, and reading fluency scores increasing quickly. But what's most exciting is that the children and teachers are using e-readers even when not being asked to, downloading books and samples and coming to voluntary summer reading programs to have access to the e-books. When books are scarce, access becomes enormously attractive.

This, then, may be a model for use of technology in education: Find or develop technology that allows us to strengthen the basic triangle between teacher, student, and ideas. The example of e-readers can provide valuable clues for how technologies can successfully help education, and in the process, help millions of children get access to books throughout the world.

"In the map you can see what areas are most affected by the famine, where food is being distributed, and how much more funding is needed to meet the demand," said Bonnie Bogle, of WFP's partners, Development Seed, by email. "For example, you see that the most affected areas have limited humanitarian access, as they are in the al Shabab controlled sections of Somalia."

On InMobi's blog, Surag Patel said, "This growth was largely driven by the continued growing trend towards smartphone adoption in these markets."

Nigeria led the pack in terms of growth, at +8.4%. Nokia remained the leader among devices, with 37.9% of phones on the Nokia OS and 61% of impressions registered on Nokia handsets.

Please note the chart below covers only April.

During the same period, mobile advertising grew by 10% in Asia, reaching 18 billion monthly impressions.

Mobile phone photo by David Dennis

"The Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI) goes live this morning," White African wrote yesterday, "in a big event that includes President Kibaki, as well as many politicians, government officials and local technologists."

The Data

The data is being made available via the Socrata platform. Socrata calls the Kenyan initiative, "one of the most comprehensive open data projects anywhere in the world" and writes that its goal is "to create enabling infrastructure that can accelerate human and economic development throughout communities in Kenya."

Data has been pulled from national census, the ministry of education, ministry of health, CDF projects, the World Bank and other sources, according to White African and Socrata. The data is organized under six types: education, energy, health, water and sanitation, population and poverty.

Paul Kukubo, CEO of Kenya's ICT, the state corporation in charge of the development and marketing of the information, communications and technology sector in the country, outlined the hopes for the program in greater detail.

"For the first time ever, people in our communities will be empowered to choose the best schools for their children, locate the nearest health facility that meets their needs, and use regional statistics to lobby their constituency representative for better infrastructure and services in their county. The research community, on the other hand, can use this consolidated resource of valuable new data to discover practical insights that can guide economic and human development in Kenya. For example: What effect does access to drinking water have on school attendance in children? What is the correlation between access to healthcare and school grades? Where does it make sense to build the next hospital? School? Irrigation project? All Kenyans can now participate in finding solutions to these crucially important questions."

Data-Inspired Projects

The Ministry of Information and Communications is awarding grants to support the development of native and mobile apps that use the data, through iHub, a Kenyan tech hub and community of 4,250 geeks.

Ushahidi, notorious for not sitting on their hands when there are data to crush, have already created a health-based project. They have taken the census data and overlaid it with healthcare institution data on their Huduma site. "It's still very beta, but it shows what can be done in just a few days."

Other projects include the Msema Kweli mobile app, "that allows you to find CDF projects near you, and for you to add pictures of them" and an app by Virtual Kenya "that shows which MPs refuse to pay taxes."

Almost 30% of Kenyans have Internet access and just over 63% have mobile access.

Nairobi photo by Brian Snelson | thanks to Rassina

Well, the entire continent of Africa begs to differ with that cartoonish picture. Having covered African technology extensively here, and having been invited to speak at the continent's largest digital technology conference, I wanted to find out what Africans themselves were doing in terms of utilizing the social web to short circuit the abiding desire of the West to draft Brad Pitt and Bono as the voices of Africa. I found the Kuyu Project.

I became aware of the Kenya-based Kuyu Project through one of my Twitter follows, Rassina Hassan, who works with the group. She introduced me to the Kuyu's Founder and Executive Director, Simeon Oriko.

Kuyu's focus is teaching high school students in Africa how to use social media to affect change in their communities. As they say in their mission statement:

"We deeply believe that by offering an open platform and teaching digital techniques we are fueling the dreams and aspirations of these young minds which might one day lead to the innovations and technologically driven solutions that will change Africa and the world."

One of their initiatives is StorySpaces, "a mobile and web based social media application aimed at enabling different communities to interact and participate in global conversations online." Their hope in building it is to allow users to transform their online conversations "into offline tangible actions that make an impact in the local community."

They're currently in the process of setting up a StorySpace for citizen journalists and hacktivists in Uganda "to respond to the escalating protests about food and fuel price increases in the country" and raising funds through IndieGoGo, a crowdsourcing funding tool.

I interviewed Oriko, a senior at the University of Eastern Africa, Baraton, via email about the project, its goals and the utility of the social web in an African context.

The ReadWriteWeb Interview: Simeon Oriko

I started The Kuyu Project in June 2010 after conducting a series of digital literacy camps in various high schools around the University of Eastern Africa, Baraton as the chairperson of the local computer science students association. The camps were mostly built around training the kids on how to use web based tools such as Google, Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha for their education. As the camps grew bigger and became more popular, we increased the training and materials to include personal objectives and social change. The camps were primarily targeted at senior high school students.

What inspired its creation?

The inspiration came from the impact I saw in the youth I was teaching at the digital literacy camps. One girl in particular was inspired to use Google and later social networks on her mobile phone to seek out information to achieve her dream of becoming a pilot. For her and a number of other kids, they quickly learned the value of technology and using it as advantage to seek out new opportunities for effecting change in their communities as well as achieving their personal objectives.

Reflecting on this, it became clear to me that we could create a dynamic framework for scaling a youth initiative based on the learning value of technology to address the unique social, cultural and economic challenges that face our continent. I decided to use the interesting new realities the social web and mobile technology presented in Africa as the foundation to build our grassroots youth technology development project.

Next page: Digital literacy

How important is digital literacy to the future of Africa's youth, its economy, etc?

Digital literacy helps create mind share, intellectual capital and capacity, as well as innovative solutions which will empower and include African youth in fully participating in the 21st century. It is also critical to the growth of knowledge societies and ecosystems in the rapidly changing technological landscape of Africa. Africans are already next generation web users accessing social networks and the mobile web through their phones. This remarkable social mobile revolution across the continent is creating explosive new opportunities ranging from politics, governance, entrepreneurship, commerce, banking, media and moving towards disrupting all other industries. We're seeing some of the adaptive issues that occur when youth aren't adequately prepared to enter a workforce, motivated to vote or start their own ventures which largely depend on their digital literacy and participatory skills. As evidenced in recent world changing events in Tunisia, Egypt and other parts of the continent, Africa is ripe for a transformational technological youth quake that extends beyond social media and mobile technology as revolution tools towards encompassing all other aspects of our lives.

How will your project help?

Primarily, the Kuyu project will create a digital literacy framework to build on:

a. Greater visibility and multimedia opportunities for African youth who are under-represented and marginalized in their societies to share their unique stories and join the global conversation

b. Upgrading the digital and creative skills of African youth to include mobile and cloud computing technology

c. Mind share and dynamic participation in various situations concerning the current seismic social, economic and political changes occurring all over Africa

d. Intellectual capital, creativity and the capacity for technology transfer skills among peers

e. Scaling informative and tested solutions as a direct result of facilitating knowledge sharing, collaborative and collective problem solving

f. Critical mass of stronger connected communities with a pool of champions growing solidly behind relevant causes and firmly dedicated towards advancing them.

g. Accumulation of valuable resource base from tapping into the virtual and physical cognitive wealth of actively contributing communities sharing and applying ideas

h. Viral network of talented African technologists and developers spreading digital literacy and innovation in an open crowd sourced platform

What other projects using, or about, digital tech, in Kenya, and in Africa in general, do you find interesting?

I'm biased toward mobile and social change projects. The ones I find interesting in this field include Voices of Africa, (specifically Haki Zetu and SPARC which is a solar powered Internet kiosk aimed at helping rural communities get digital connectivity as well as creating local economies) and Revoda, a social election monitoring tool.

What does the future hold for Kenya, and Africa in general?

I believe Africa's future greatly relies on technological advances and brain-gain currently driven by social media and mobile technology with increasingly-connected African youth and diaspora recreating and re-imagining its immense potential by deviating from existing story lines to establish a new powerful vision of change across the continent. Social technologies such as the one we're building at StorySpaces are radically changing the narrative and fueling the dreams and aspirations of young minds which might lead to the innovations and technologically driven solutions that will change and benefit Africa and the world.

Can you describe how you conduct your digital literacy campaigns and the scope of your digital literacy camps?

Our digital literacy campaign consists of conducting digital camps for our trainees to acquire relevant digital skills particularly in the areas of citizen media, hacktivism, youth empowerment, government transparency and accountability. Trainees will be specifically taught to share their acquired skills and join our Youth Mentorship Program designed to increase their teaching output to peers. This will ensure a wider reach for our project to gain and build a viral grassroots movement of digitally savvy youth starting in Kenya and scaling to the rest of their population in Africa.

To date we have trained high school students in the following schools in Kenya:

● Kapsabet Boys High School
● Kapsabet Girls High School
● Mwiruti Secondary School
● St. Joseph's Chepterit Girls Secondary School
● Chemundu High School
● Terige Boys High School
● Baraton Adventist Secondary School

The training camps at these schools have been conducted in partnership with the Baraton Information Technology Students Association, BITSA. This organization includes all the Information Science and Computing students at the University of Eastern Africa, Baraton.

We plan to expand our digital literacy camps to Uganda and Ghana in the next half of 2011 with a target goal of reaching out to another 2500 students.

How does StorySpaces work and where are you on the project?

StorySpaces was recently demoed at the Media 140 conference in Barcelona.

StorySpaces is envisioned as an open platform web and mobile based social network where youth can share stories and quickly see the important news and stories in their social network. StorySpaces is based on the idea that users relate better to experiences and identify with actions and want to participate rather than just consume information. This provides them with raw material as a foundation for transforming digital conversations into practical offline actions. In the social web it offers an alternative from the limits of Facebook and Twitter in documenting full length stories.

StorySpaces will hold a collection of multi-media story snippets composed of relevant topical themes that are easy to set up; youth, aspiring journalists, and other users can add a post (story) without having to set up a blog or worrying about those things that set barriers to entry of stories in other words, promoting transparency, security and ease-of-access.

StorySpaces can be used for all types of web and mobile blogging from modern storytelling and traditional storytelling techniques to citizen journalism. One of the ways we plan to use it for The Kuyu Project is to give youth a place to connect with others who are seeking to effect positive social change to find peers, mentors tapping into a resource base to guide them in their paths.

We are working on creating StorySpaces not only as a Web application but also for a variety of mobile handsets including iOS and Android. In addition SMS/MMS capabilities will be a part of the design. The mobile app will allow citizens to subscribe to news feeds from trusted sources and to search for news stories by keyword and download those stories. Some of the underlying problems with the current solutions is that while many are using blogging to take active roles in providing news about local communities, many see setting up a blog as too complicated. Additionally, social networking tools like Facebook have their own culture and meaning to youth, but are not specifically designed to encourage promoting stories of social good. While other tools such as Twitter offer microblogging, but not the opportunity for extended stories, StorySpaces is designed to give youth a place to connect with others who are seeking to effect positive social change and to find mentors to guide them in their paths.

Next page: Creating a team

How did you put your team together?

The team met on Twitter actually. I was connected with Deb Elzie (@debelzie) and she had a strong interest in the implementation of The Kuyu Project. When I shared with my vision with her and my desire to create a mobile and web application, she thought I should meet Victor Miclovich (@vicmiclovich) a talented programmer based in Uganda. We had a 7 hour Skype session one weekend and our core team was formed with Rassina Hassan (@rassina) joining us later. We are building a pan-African virtual startup with global ties and our team of 20+ smart volunteers continues to grow. The idea for StorySpaces was formed through collaboration. A majority of the team is based in Uganda and Kenya with a number of others in West Africa - Emeka Okoye (@EmekaOkoye) in Nigeria , Alfred Rowe (@Nukturnal) in Ghana - and in the United States. We all meet via Twitter or through our regular Skype group sessions and it has been a great experience so far, the entire team is very committed to seeing the project launch successfully.

What is your background?

My background in tech began as a child and picked up with the advent of mobile and social technologies. My interest in these fields led me to an early conceptualization of Mobile Cloud Computing and interest in ICT4D. I've since focused efforts on creating a mobile cloud computing platform and digital literacy initiatives.

I also have a strong attachment to the African tech industry. I've previously been a Microsoft Student Partner and also partnered with under sea fibre-optic organization, SEACOM on a number of projects.

I'm currently involved in the "Digital Natives With a Cause?" program which is a joint program by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, and Dutch development organization, HIVOS. My contribution to the program involves participation in a number of workshops that culminate in a book documenting the role of youth and technology in social transformation processes.

I'm also a member of the iHub, a tech incubator and innovation hub. In the coming months, I'll be interning with m:Lab, a consortia of four organizations that aims to facilitate demand-driven innovation by regional entrepreneurs, ensuring that breakthrough low-cost, high-value mobile solutions can be developed and scaled-up into sustainable businesses that address social needs.

***

Although Simeon and his crew are creative and motivated individuals, it hardly takes away from their uniqueness to point out that such young people are far from impossible to find in Africa. In fact, Africa, with its adventurous spirit and entrepreneurism, especially as regards the mobile web, is one of the most exciting areas of the world when it comes to new technology.

There are doubtless places on the continent that need help with food and clearly too many places that need health assistance, professionals and teaching, but there are also many places and tons of people like the Kuyu crew, people who are working hands-on to move their people and countries forward. They do not "deserve your help" as much as they should inspire your admiration.

Keep a weather eye on Tech Africa. These days, if you blink, you're liable to miss something cool.

In an interview with Geekwire, Anokwa explained the kit is already being used to do socio-economic and health surveys. The survey data is tied to GPS locations and assigned images. Additional projects include creating "decision support" for medical professional sand "building multimedia-rich nature mapping tools.."

The ODK is an out-of-box tool that allows the user to build a data collection form or survey, collect the data on a mobile device and send it to a server, aggregate the collected data on a server and extract it in useful formats.

The kit has been used to monitor fraud in Afghanistan, map water sources in Ghana, monitor deforestation in Brazil, survey human rights violations in the Central African Republic, to support community health workers in Boston and more.

As a detailed example of the use of the Open Data Kit, he offered USAID's AMPATH project in Kenya.

"AMPATH in Kenya has been using ODK for their HIV home-based counseling and testing program. Their counselors go house to house with phones running ODK. The software walks them through a standardized counseling and testing protocol and the geo-tagged results are sent to their OpenMRS medical record system using WiFi or GPRS. AMPATH has reached some 65,000 individuals and has been able to rapidly and cost-effectively identify individuals at significant risk from HIV, saving lives."

Uganda, at the insistence of its national police commissioner, has sent its three largest ISPs a memo requesting they begin blocking what they called "Tweeter" (presumably Twitter) and Facebook, in order to "eliminate the connection and sharing of information that incites the public."

They have made the mistake that others have made, including Egypt and Libya, that the tech is the issue. It's not, of course. The fulcrum for the lever of disruption are the people. When they're fed up, there's trouble.

In this case, the Ugandan people have been protesting the abrupt rise in the prices of food and fuel in the face of such governmental purchases as a $720 Russian-made fighter jet. The street marches have been met by police violence.

The online expression of the protests is the hashtag #walktowork.

Thanks to Rassina | Kasubi tombs photo by notphilatall

To enter, make a digital video that answers the question, "Why do you want to help Worldreader bring 'Books to All' to the developing world?" Viewers will vote to determine who wins the opportunity to work with the group in Africa.

Upload your video to the eDreams Facebook page for consideration. The deadline is March 30 and the winner will be the person who submits the video with the most public votes by the end of April 1. The winner will be announced on April 4.

The winner will have a chance to work with Worldreader on their Ghana program and have everything paid for. Moody-Prieto outlines the trip.

"(The winner) will be flown down to Ghana, met by someone on our team, spend a day touring Accra, then they'll head out to the schools where we have the e-readers and help Worldreader with reading exercises with the students and help out teachers. They'll do that for a couple of days, and then we'll be following up with some of the students who we filmed last time, going with them into their homes again and talking to their parents about how they are using the e-readers in the family."

Don't expect a luxury safari, however, she warns.

"It ain't 5 star luxury living. When someone asked me about the hotel's thread count, I said...um, 5? But it's the real deal: volunteering in the middle of no-where with this amazing technology that is going to change the lives of these students and eventually all of Africa and the developing world."