Fantastic story. I would love to hear some first-hand accounts / comments from any Kenyans on HN. Is there anyone here currently in Kenya and involved in startups?
Kenyan Women Create Their Own 'Geek Culture'
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Re: Kenyan Women Create Their Own 'Geek Culture'
#32Fantastic story. I would love to hear some first-hand accounts / comments from any Kenyans on HN. Is there anyone here currently in Kenya and involved in startups?
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Re: Kenyan Women Create Their Own 'Geek Culture'
#33I so wish I could invest in some of these companies...
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Re: Kenyan Women Create Their Own 'Geek Culture'
#34Fantastic story. I would love to hear some first-hand accounts / comments from any Kenyans on HN. Is there anyone here currently in Kenya and involved in startups?
I'm not Kenyan, but I've been based in East Africa for the last two years and have been living in Nairobi and running a startup there since March. Happy to answer questions. (I'll be on and offline today because of the holdiay)
It's fantastic to see Sue and M-Farm getting this kind of exposure.
Re: Kenyan Women Create Their Own 'Geek Culture'
#35Re: Kenyan Women Create Their Own 'Geek Culture'
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Re: Kenyan Women Create Their Own 'Geek Culture'
#37Projects like this make me hopeful :)
Projects like this make me hopeful for the world, but fretful for America. Not because of the increased competition or outsourcing or anything like that, but because by and large we've created a political climate where large infrastructure developments are nearly impossible to implement. We eschew any sort of tax-funded large digital infrastructure projects while at the same time we do our best to keep regional ISP m…
First, we have tons of fiber. Tons.
Second, are coaxial lines really that bad? You do need literally bundles of fiber for backbone activity, but last-mile? DOCSIS 3.0 is 42Mbit/channel, with as many channels as the endpoints can support. Comcast has already offered 305Mbit. We will need fiber last-mile one day, but not nearly any time soon.
I suspect the real limitation is a grab-bag of things like:
- Increasing speeds highlights damaged coax, which would then require repair
- Slowing the growth in speed means they can continue to charge a lot for service that is easy to provide
- The true bottleneck is probably somewhere in the ISP, for example routing infrastructure, which would need to be upgraded
Re: Kenyan Women Create Their Own 'Geek Culture'
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing you didn't drive on dirt roads or carry all of the fuel for the trip with you in jugs, all while hoping you had enough bribe money for anyone who might turn up with a rusty AK-47 and a barricade to keep them from taking said computer from you along the way.
Not sure if you are kidding but I am pretty sure Kenya wasn't THAT bad. It's actually a fairly stable country, even with the high level corruption scandals and occasional election violence.
It has enjoyed relative political stability but it's not as safe as you think. My exes father lived there for many years. One night his compound was raided, his guard killed and he and his family were trapped in the house. In the morning the raiders left but he still shudders when he thinks about it.
Re: Kenyan Women Create Their Own 'Geek Culture'
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was the source of your prior beliefs about the country? It might proof enlightening to question those sources of information henceforth....
Movies.
African Men vs. Hollywood Stereotypes
Re: Kenyan Women Create Their Own 'Geek Culture'
#40Fantastic story. I would love to hear some first-hand accounts / comments from any Kenyans on HN. Is there anyone here currently in Kenya and involved in startups?
I'm Kenyan. The scene mostly revolves around the incubators in Nairobi, the iHub, Nailabs and the 88mph Garage being the most vibrant. The iHub is closer to a typical hackerspace than the others, which are more concerned with startups actively seeking investment than meetups and such. I'd wager that half of all Kenyan startups are building mobile apps of some sort. The stack is quite varied. SMS is king here, but J2ME, Symbian and Android are also fairly popular. Some of the more interesting startups I've interacted with:
http://wezatele.com - I interned there early this year. http://mfarm.co.ke http://kopokopo.com http://frontlinesms.com - I did some work there last year. http://ushahidi.com - nonprofit, so I'm not sure it qualifies, but one of our better known exports. http://pesapal.com - I dislike the obvious play on PayPal, but they're an awesome team
There are many more, but those are the ones that immediately came to mind.
There's something of a running joke that every second startup is an M-something, presumably due to the runaway success of mpesa, a mobile money service by one of the telcos, Safaricom.
Some more established players, not startups in any sense, are Craft Silicon and Seven Seas technologies.