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In Aug. 2011 I was honored to give the AIBUMA keynote address (slides here), where I shared experiences at my home university, Boston College, leveraging Mobile, Social Media, Entrepreneurship, and Business Education.  I was graciously invited to share the talk again with students at the U. of Nairobi Business School (where some courses are using portions of my free online business & technology textbook).  I was floored by the enthusiasm among the young entrepreneurs that I met at AIBUMA. I’m not the one to champion entrepreneurship in Nairobi – I’m painfully ignorant & this was just my first trip to Kenya.  However, with limited time and sheepishness given the inevitable “who does this guy think he is” reaction the true experts must have, I tried to pull together some quick links for those attending the talk.  Hopefully this will migrate to a wiki or other great local resource, and there is likely already a service up that I’m not aware of. I’ll be happy to point folks to a better resource as soon as it comes my way.  In the meantime, thanks for your tolerance – I do hope that you find this helpful! And for Kenya’s budding entrepreneurs – go get ‘em and let me know as you launch & grow successful!

• AfriGadget – blog on ‘solving everyday problems with African ingenuity’. Great source for inspiration, ideas, and role models. You might also want to follow the team’s personal blogs (and seek them out by searching for them on Twitter).
• iHub – the ‘Open Space for technologists, investors, tech companies and hackers in Nairobi’. Nairobi geeks – these are your peeps! The site’s About page lists names of key team members.  Again, a scrappy entrepreneur follows experts on Twitter, so search them out!
• mLab East Africa – huge local resource that ‘aims to foster innovation and entrepreneurship within the Kenyan community, with a focus on Web and mobile services’. Be sure to check out the links on Incubation and Training.
• nailab – Nairobi Incubation Lab – supporting smart and business savvy entrepreneurs turn their ideas into viable businesses.
• Pivot25 – mLab sponsored conference.  Mine this site to learn from winners and find out more about the Nairobi startup scene.
• IPO48 – 48 hour bootcamp events meant to springboard mobile & Internet entrepreneurship. There have been IPO48 events in Nairobi including one in Aug. 2011.
• m-Farm – for inspiration, start learning about the winner of the 2010 Nairobi IPO48 event targeted at using mobile devices to empower African farmers. See m-Farm’s appearance on NTV, read a blog post update on the project where you can hear co-founder Jamila Abass (who tweets @kouljay) talk about her journey.
• FutureLab at Nairobi iLab – blog post that details (and offers video montage) of the Feb. 28, 2010 iLab session.  Scroll below to find the names of several people at the event.  Follow them for more insight.
• Afrinnovator – Blog covering the African startup scene.
• Ushahidi & iHub co-founder Erik Hersman, who tweets as @WhiteAfrican, and who grew up in Kenya and Somalia, has many useful resources on his blog’s about page.
• Wilfred Mworia’s Blog – While blog is not recently active, mine for resources.  Mworia is the head of African Pixel – and former Tech Evangelist (Academic) for Microsoft East Africa.  Here’s a link to slides from a talk on Kenyan tech entrepreneurship that he gave. Another example of someone in the local scene that you want to connect with!
• Nairobits – after you become sufficiently geeked up, be sure to give back.  One place you can help is with Nairobits, a digital design school that helps empower some of Nairobi’s most disadvantaged youth. A worldwide credo of successful entrepreneurs is that when you do well, ‘pay it forward’ by helping others.
• Kiwanja – Founded by Ken Banks (founder of FrontlineSMS), Kiwanja consults with non-profit organizations about using mobile technology to improve their impact on Africa.
• MobileActive.org – Very comprehensive blog lists descriptions of organizations using mobile technology for good as well as case studies of successful mobile programs.
• The Lean Startup Wiki – many startups are leaveraging the ‘Lean Startup’ methodology.  This wiki contains links to many resources.  Also be sure to mine YouTube, SlideShare, Twitter, StackOverflow, Quora, CodeAcademy, and other platforms for ways to learn.
• Ansca Mobile’s Corona – this is an easy-to-earn cross platform development tool that uses the Lua programming language to create apps for iPhone and Android. There are many other tools to use, but Corona is a great way for non-coders to get up to speed quickly without the Objective C or Java-induced pain of conventional iOS and Android programming (I recommend it to my students).  The demo toolkit (which gives you access to the tool so that you can learn to code) is free.  You’ll have to pay when you’re ready to actually compile the code to run on iOS or Android (you otherwise ‘run’ code in a simulator for a Windows PC or Mac).  Also be sure to check out the awesome demo projects at LearningCorona.com. Even without a formal class, you should be able to start going through these examples, modifying code so you can learn. Those looking to create web startups would be wise to look into resources for learning Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP, mySQL, and other popular (and free) development tools.
• Greater-Boston / Kenya connections mentioned in my Nairobi talks – Sanegy: Spring 2011 winner of MIT$100K entrepreneurship prize, is deploying their ‘waste for fuel/fertilizer’ project in Kenya first & leverages tech being developed at U. of Nairobi (see Tom Odoyo’s profile). txtEagle – (founded by Nathan Eagle of MIT Media Lab & Northeastern) offers mobile phone credit for survey responses. Venture capitalists see this as a profitable way to reach 2 billion+ hard-to-access consumers. Eagle raised $8.5 million in Spring 2011 from Boston-based Spark Capital (investor in Twitter, Foursquare, and Tumblr, among others).  Watch Eagle’s talk at PopTech 2010.
• Gallaugher.com Recommended Resources – my own list of things I share for aspiring geek entrepreneurs back at Boston College.  Very Boston-centric, but has some good things you should read.
• AcademiX 2011 -includes video to a featured talk I gave at Apple Inc.’s educator’s conference.  It was a precursor to many of the ideas I presented at AIBUMA and should provide some background for those who couldn’t come to the AIBUMA event.

Super big thanks to BC’s Erica Graf who helped in compiling this resource!

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