MOBILE BUZZ: The pivot 25 conference in action - Nairobi, Kenya

Straight out of school

Edwin Seno: A lot of young people are going toward mobile development after campus. It's the platform that has the best potential in Africa. It has much larger penetration. There's so many more mobile phones compared to the number of PCs we have here.

Taha Jiwaji: In Africa, people see that everyone has a mobile phone. If you're an engineer or you have a technical background, it's low-cost entry [to get into app development]. There are no capital requirements. It's essentially your brains and a computer. That's all you need.

Ernest Mwebaze: The phones keep on getting more sophisticated. You can actually do a lot of data crunching on a mobile phone. People are trying to get that niche while it's still green.

Edwin Seno: It's a good thing. It shows that we have a very ambitious generation coming up. If they're able to take advantage of the mobile phone, you'll be seeing a lot more innovation coming out of East Africa and Africa as a whole.

Tech community creation

Erik Hersman: In East Africa you have communities that work together, and although there is competition amongst people, they're not always undercutting each other.

Edwin Seno: The tech community in Nairobi is full of life at the moment. A while back you wouldn't find any investor who was interested in anything to do with technology. But now that we have all these proofs of concepts that technology can actually work in Africa, there's a lot of investors willing to pump money into the sector.

Ernest Mwebaze: Nairobi has a really vibrant tech community, especially for mobile apps. In Kampala, it's there but it's not as concentrated and focused as Nairobi. But I think it's really growing, and there are a lot companies, small companies that have come up in Kampala, that are harnessing this power of the mobile. So, I think it's going to go places.

Erik Hersman: I'm involved with the iHub in Nairobi, which was founded just over a year ago – a kind of local place for the local tech community to come in and hack on new things and new ideas. It quickly became the nerve center for a lot of what's going on here. I think that's still what's needed – that [technologists] have a home. This gives them a space to work from.

Taha Jiwaji: I would like to see more collaboration. There's not much of a tech community in Tanzania. We're trying to build that from the ground up. Here, it's not disorganized, but it's isolated. People are out doing their own thing. We're really trying to bring people together and see where people could work together, share from each other's experiences, all that good stuff. 

Edwin Seno: I think all these success stories that are happening around us are encouraging a lot of enthusiasm in the technology sector. Across the globe, there's a convergence that's occurring between the mobile and the PC. And everything eventually, I believe, will be mobile. The possibilities are limitless.