(Der Spiegel) In a loft with high windows, wooden floors and long tables, young women with their hair in small braids and men in colorful T-shirts sit bent over their laptops. They are students, bloggers, web designers and programmers. Their office, called iHub, could be somewhere in tech-obsessed California, but is actually located in a place few people associate with cutting-edge tech culture -- Nairobi.
People are gathering at iHub to work toward the future of the Internet in Africa, a future which is not only looking increasingly rosy, but has the potential to profoundly change the continent's infrastructure, economy and even politics.
One of the people working at iHub is Wesley Kirinya, 30, a dot-com businessman who dropped out of med school three years ago to found his company, Leti Games. He now has six employees around Africa, and rents a one-and-a-half-meter (five-foot) table in front of the windows here at iHub, just a few steps away from the building's café. This is his headquarters while Leti Games is in its start-up phase.