Excerpt
I had to chuckle when I saw this headline on a Sunday New York Times story about technological innovation in Kenya. Nairobi the next Palo Alto? Relatively few Kenyans have Internet access, and the bloggers, computer programmers and self-proclaimed tech geeks I've met in Nairobi complain of slow, expensive Internet connections (although these reportedly are getting better) and thick bureaucracies that stifle innovation.
But as the hub of East Africa Nairobi does not lack for sharp, tech-savvy minds, and this story points out some of the more innovative projects under way here. The overwhelming majority of them are relatively low-tech -- or, more accurately, light-tech. Programmers are devising cheap, simple applications for cell phones, which sell for as little as $30 here and are far more commonly used than email, land lines and even bank accounts.
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