Sunday, July 20, 2008

Nairobi's Rising Profile as a Technology Hotbed

Interesting article from the New York Times on Nairobi's emerging coding community. Google set-up a development office there last September, which is intended to be a testing bed for new products and ideas for the African continent.

Being in Nairobi last week, I saw many of the same access issues that plague us here in Nigeria, with many of the young ladies who I worked with, who lived outside Nairobi, not having access to computers or the Internet or the means to pay for access. However, the costs seemed much lower than in Nigeria. It was also fairly easy to go to a provider like Safaricom and buy a modem, which would provide fairly fast wireless connectivity. This could be on a pre-paid or post-paid basis.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Internet access is so crucial now that I cant imagine not having any access. I don't even mind the cost, its the slow broadband access that frustrates me. I hope speed of access is being addressed in Lagos now.

Ore said...

Tell me about it..

There's the fibre optic cables being laid by Glo, which promises 'real' high-speed access.