I'm Kenyan. The scene mostly revolves around the incubators in Nairobi, the iHub, Nailabs and the 88mph Garage being the most vibrant. The iHub is closer to a typical hackerspace than the others, which are more concerned with startups actively seeking investment than meetups and such. I'd wager that half of all Kenyan startups are building mobile apps of some sort. The stack is quite varied. SMS is king here, but J2ME, Symbian and Android are also fairly popular. Some of the more interesting startups I've interacted with:
There are many more, but those are the ones that immediately came to mind.
There's something of a running joke that every second startup is an M-something, presumably due to the runaway success of mpesa, a mobile money service by one of the telcos, Safaricom.
Some more established players, not startups in any sense, are Craft Silicon and Seven Seas technologies.
http://wezatele.com - I interned there early this year. http://mfarm.co.ke http://kopokopo.com http://frontlinesms.com - I did some work there last year. http://ushahidi.com - nonprofit, so I'm not sure it qualifies, but one of our better known exports. http://pesapal.com - I dislike the obvious play on PayPal, but they're an awesome team
There are many more, but those are the ones that immediately came to mind.
There's something of a running joke that every second startup is an M-something, presumably due to the runaway success of mpesa, a mobile money service by one of the telcos, Safaricom.
Some more established players, not startups in any sense, are Craft Silicon and Seven Seas technologies.