Business Daily (Nairobi)
Kui Kinyanjui
16 June 2011
The atmosphere is electric, the air thick with anticipation, and a breathless crowd collectively sits on the edge of their chairs as the first contestant steps up onto the stage.
As with any event, the usual worries are at the top of everyone’s mind: Will the sound work? Will the presentations live up to the hype of the event? Will the long weeks of planning be worth it?
Luckily, as the first speaker steps on stage and smoothly delivers his presentation, a collective sigh of relief whistles through the room. It’s going to be a success.
These were the scenes at the opening of Pivot25 earlier this week, a two-day meeting where the top innovations in the East African region were show-cased to the world.
Bringing together developers, venture capitalists, policymakers and educationalists, Pivot25 aims to become a standard feature in the country’s event calendar; boosting the profile of the rapidly growing innovation sector in the region.
As the country’s first major conference of its kind, Pivot25 is significant as it encapsulates what has been happening in offices, labs and university halls for the last five years, where a growing number of developers have been creating tools for mobile phones and for online use.
From mobile-based e-commerce solutions to M-health products to document recovery solutions, the developments being show-cased all had one thing in common; they were created to meet the needs of local users .
Pivot25 acted as the nexus of a technology revolution that is seeping the region, bringing together all the elements required for developers to push their ideas into real businesses.
The idea came about after a consortium consisting of the iHub, Emobilis and the University of Nairobi won a grant, funded by Nokia, Infodev and the World Wide Web Foundation to set up the mLab, a mobile laboratory that would serve as the focal point for mobile application development training, incubation and development.
What was most conspicuous about the event was the fact that several of the guests were from other countries, where word of Kenya’s new innovative image is attracting investors who are keen to see how our locally made solutions can change the world.
It would not be far-fetched to say that the eyes of the world are now upon us, and we must now, more than ever before, keep up the momentum created by events like Pivot25 to sustain the creation of what could be Kenya’s biggest economic driver in a few years.
We can attribute all this hype around development on Kenyan products like M-Pesa and Ushahidi, the two most visible examples of what Kenyan innovation can achieve.
M-Pesa remains one of the world’s best known success story of mobile money transfer, while Ushahidi created a new way of sharing information-crowd sourcing-for the public good.
Both products have won global plaudits for their work in respectively easing access to financial services and in facilitating relief efforts.
As the interest generated by events like Pivot25 shows, its high time that Kenya produced the next big innovation.
AllAfrica – All the Time
Read more here:
Pivot25 Pioneers a Nexus of Country’s Finest Tech Brains