Kenya courts Silicon Valley as it aims to become Africa’s high-tech centre

San Francisco has been the leading tourist city in the US for the past few years in a row. But the Kenyan visitors to the Bay Area in early October were not interested in the breathtaking Golden Gate Bridge or Lombard Street, the world’s most crooked. They had their sights on Silicon Valley, the undisputed capital of America’s high-tech industry and home to such greats as Google, Facebook, HP and more recently Twitter.


It turns out that San Francisco’s tourism appeal and technology credentials are in fact closely related. What makes Silicon Valley so great? I asked Dan Kaplan, Product Marketing Manager at Twilio, one of the new startups dotting the valley. ‘The first thing is that it is a place that rich people want to live. People who make their money want to stay,” he told me, paraphrasing Y Combinator founder Paul Graham. “Secondly is that it has two top-notch world-class technical institutions, Stanford and Berkeley, which produce talented engineers every year who are hungry to build new tech companies.”
read on at source: Business Daily


Kenya: Silicon Savanna ready to take on the world
When we asked a street-side vendor, overseeing his modest collection of newspapers and magazines, when he expected the latest editions of our publications, he whipped out a mobile phone, punched some numbers and moments later told us, “You will find them here in two days”. Everyone in Kenya, at least so it seems, has a mobile phone. There are over 20 million of them knocking about all over the country. On our way to view Kenya’s geo-thermal power generation facilities on the floor of the Rift Valley at Naivasha, we stopped to ask directions from a dusty goatherd. He didn’t know but his cousin would; out came the mobile and we were on our way. But mobiles are old hat in Kenya. The internet is the in-thing now.

Internet connection has gone up from being available to 2 million people to 12.5 million in less than two years. Access is mainly through the mobile phone. Kenyans have become masters at using their mobiles for virtually all transactions, reading papers and blogs, checking on prices of commodities and shares, and watching all kinds of entertainment including films and football matches
read on at source: African Business


On Becoming An Animation Powerhouse

As Kenyan tech companies push for their vision of a "silicon savannah" in this East African nation, local animators say their industry is set to ride the high-tech wave toward becoming an animation powerhouse.

Buoyed by the success of "Tinga Tinga Tales," a toon for the BBC's children's web CBeebies co-produced by the U.K.'s Tiger Aspect Prods. and the Nairobi-based Homeboyz Animation, Kenyan animators are hopeful that their country will emerge as the next big market for outsourcing. Allan Mwaniki, director and lead animator at Homeboyz, says that the scale of "Tinga Tinga Tales," which involved nearly 50 animators in Nairobi, was proof that the Kenyan industry could effectively handle a large-scale production.

"We've shown the world we can do it," he says. Kenya's animation industry began to blossom with a series of U.N.-sponsored training programs from 2004-2006, which brought Kenyan animators together with artists from around the world.

Dubbed Africa Animated!, the initiative was created to enhance the ability of African animators to compete with the Western imports, which dominate children's programming on African TV stations. The workshops gave Kenyan artists an important platform to show their work on a global stage, eventually leading to the "Tinga Tinga" collaboration. The series was a watershed moment for local animators. source: http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/kenyas-silicon-savannah-becoming-an-animation-powerhouse