Fritz Ekwoge, the serial entrepreneur co-founder of Kerawa.com and creator of iYam.mobi, has returned from a prolonged blogging hiatus with a creative and entertaining interview with…himself. Fee, a self-described African geek (pictured at right, below) sat down for a talk with his alter ego, Fritz, the Cameroonian technology journalist, at Limbe Labs Ventures’ third floor balcony.

An excerpt from their unique conversation follows:

Fritz: Hi Fee.
Fee: Hi Fritz.
Fritz: So this is one of those bizarre moments when you talk to yourself, huh?
Fee: I guess it is.
Fritz: What do you suggest we talk about today?
Fee: How about we do a talk on the new product I am about to launch, iYam.mobi. Some nice folks out there might be interested in the whats and whys and hows even before launch.
Fritz: That will be cool. It definitely might give some answers to those who want to know what you’ve been cooking up lately, especially after the success of your online classifieds site Kerawa.com has had in Cameroon for some years now.
Fee: That’s the idea. If we’re cool with the concept, I’ll play myself. An African geek, who is now trying to obtain more money from his passion. You’ll play the Cameroonian journalist who likes reporting more on tech than politics. Strange, huh?
Fritz: What’s strange? You having a conversation with yourself, or a Cameroonian journalist reporting on tech.
Fee: Both actually.
Fee: Do you think we can do this?
Fritz: Definitely. I like this idea. Shall we begin?

Fritz and Fee discuss the evolution of iYam.mobi, an SMS-based ‘mobile mobile’ phone directory he prototyped last year. The centerpiece of the new iYam.mobi service is the SMS Apps Store—a distribution platform which allows anyone to create, consume and profit from local content. The service was designed from the outset to meet the needs of African customers, many of whom rely on low-end handsets or cannot afford cost-prohibitive mobile data rates. The platform uses a virtual currency of “iYam credits” to deliver prepaid content to subscribers daily, weekly or as-it-happens.

In addition to one-way Apps Store content delivery, iYam.mobi has extended its two-way search that allows users to query the directory and have results returned via SMS. Today, the platform enables content providers to post updates via web or SMS, so publishers can broadcast updates from any device and subscribers can get their chosen content in real-time. For developers, iYam.mobi’s application programming interface (API) opens up possibilities such as interactive SMS apps, games and custom search (flight schedules, market prices, etc.) limited only by the imagination of the developer. In this way, an entrepreneurial coder can focus on creating a compelling service and leave the heavy lifting to iYam’s hosted application framework.

Fritz is in the process of obtaining his VAS (value added service) license now. In the meantime, the SMS Apps Store is in private beta, with a public debut for Cameroon scheduled in June. Read more about the iYam.Mobi Apps Store in the full interview.

I wrapped up a month of travel last week, including a visit to Washington DC to attend Africa Gathering, a conference highlighting innovation and entrepreneurship focused on the continent, to share our experience of operating a startup incubator in Cameroon. Many thanks to the organizers, Mariéme Jamme and Ed Scotcher, who were kind enough to invite me to speak.

I chose to address the acute need for creating enabling environments on the ground for new technology companies, the present lack of seed-stage financing to fund their growth and opened with the ambitious question, Can an African tech entrepreneur change the world?

This might sound like hyperbole, but we believe (as do many others) that something big is happening here. A combination of pivotal factors including access to broadband, a youthful demographic and widespread mobile adoption, coupled with entrepreneurship and investment, will enable the African digerati to radically shape their future—not in a figurative sense, but in a real, measurable way. Teddy Ruge of Project Diaspora has been an outspoken proponent of this ideal for years. Much of his thinking is neatly captured in this piece which recently appeared in the Globe and Mail, guest edited by the indomitable Ory Okolloh.

I had a tough act to follow after Nick Tadd, Teddy, Steven King of Omidyar Networks and Tidjane Deme of Google, but managed to pull off a coherent talk despite the jet lag.

The visuals from my presentation are below. Rather than reproduce the content of my talk in blog post form, I’ve made detailed notes along with slides in PDF form available here (508 KB).

Overall, the event was a rare opportunity to share ideas, network, make partnerships and connect offline with loads of people whose work I’ve followed online for quite some time. I left the conference with my head spinning and delved into many conversations in DC over the too-short days that followed.

These and other photos from day two of the conference can be found on Ralston Smith’s flickr set.

Last week I attended the much anticipated iHub Nairobi launch, as well as participated in a pre-launch gathering of African tech hub pioneers (more on the latter in a follow-up post). A number of bloggers in Kenya and elsewhere have already covered the iHub event much better than I could have. The event was aptly described as “Geek Heaven” with a broad cross section of techies, entrepreneurs, university students, journalists, hackers, financiers, researchers and digirati all converging on the top floor space overlooking the Nairobi skyline.

I later told Erik, half-jokingly, that you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting half a dozen TED Fellows as well.

Long before the March 3rd iHub launch, it became clear that something truly unique was taking shape here. Too often, young African software engineers, designers, researchers and innovative thinkers (often referred to as the “Cheetah generation”) labor in isolation and with limited resources, working on the same or similar problems that someone else, somewhere has likely already solved. Just as important, others may be venturing down a path filled with insurmountable obstacles and dead ends.

The idea behind the iHub—and other new technology labs cropping up across Sub-Saharan Africa—is to put a group of exceptionally smart “doers” under one roof, provide them with a top notch work environment, generate ideas at a rapid pace, filter out the dead ends, present the best candidates to investors and produce viable businesses (and success stories) along the way. The end goal isn’t to generate wild profits for the iHub itself under an exclusive brand, but rather to grow a stronger technology community that hackers, researchers, policymakers and VCs are naturally drawn to.

It’s not a far-fetched idea that world class products and services can grow out of a place like the iHub. Africa is a continent renowned for innovations conceived and built from limited resources. Countless examples exist of indigenous technologies borne from constraints that have led to hugely successful solutions. Among them is M-Pesa, Kenya’s popular mobile banking and payment system, whose model has only recently been prototyped in the West. Likewise, witness how Ushahidi, an open source software effort conceived in the wake of Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence has elevated Africa’s global tech status and attracted worldwide acclaim for its rapid deployments in conflict and crisis zones such as the DRC, Gaza, Haiti and Chile, as well as serving as an invaluable tool for election monitoring. Even Washington DC has Kenya to thank for the part it played in cleaning up after Snowmageddon.

When the “Why I blog about Africa” meme made the rounds of the blogosphere awhile back, I mentioned the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship I observed in Cameroon and elsewhere on the continent. I made reference to bearing witness to “an African Renaissance” fueled by ICT and led by a young generation of idealists.

It’s an open secret now that the African Renaissance is already in its early stages. The continent is undergoing a period of rapid transformation due in part to increasingly faster and cheaper bandwidth which is being utilized by young Africans armed with laptops, smart phones and bright ideas.

This video, produced by the iHub’s neighbors the 1Percent Club in the iLab, captures some of the buzz and creativity on the ground in Nairobi:

We’ve observed the same enthusiasm and immense potential for open collaboration in our coworking and incubation space at Limbe Labs. Ideas get cross-pollinated, professional networking occurs spontaneously and businesses are accelerated at a faster pace.

In a follow-up post, I’ll discuss some ideas brainstormed in Nairobi for how this emergent tech hub network can better support African entrepreneurs.

We’re very pleased to have Nyiwung Valery Colong, the technical lead of the AMIS Project Cameroon team, join us as a full-time coworker at Limbe Labs. Valery is an articulate and inspirational young software entrepreneur whose passion for technology is superseded only by his desire to improve the lives of others. His particular focus is on smallholder farmers in Cameroon—a group with whom he shares a very personal connection.

African smallholder farmers strive to increase the productivity of their farms and make economic gains for themselves. Unfortunately, despite all their labor inputs, most African farmers end up subsisting on $1 per day while their goods are bought and sold on open markets at many times their wholesale price. Many farmers struggle to provide basic needs for their families and are unable to purchase equipment and supplies to enhance the output of their farms. Other times, following a harvest, market demand falls off and produce is sold at a loss. Combined with poor roads, pests and unpredictable weather, these challenges are often collectively referred to as the “Farmers’ Plight.”

AMIS seeks to empower smallholder farmers in two innovative ways. First, by using mobile phones, AMIS connects farmers and buyers directly with SMS thus bypassing often exploitative middlemen. Both parties benefit from the transaction; the farmers fetch better prices for their goods while buyers enjoy high quality products at reduced costs. At the same time, information about weather forecasts, sustainable farming practices and so on can be easily distributed to stakeholders. Secondly, in conversations with farmers, AMIS found that they are keen to form local associations that are able to pool resources and store their harvests until market conditions are favorable. SMS is an inexpensive, ubiquitous medium to enable this sort of community-building effort.

In May of this year, Valery traveled to San Jose, California to take part in TechSoupGlobal’s N2Y4 Conference to present AMIS as a finalist in the N2Y4 Mobile Challenge. While AMIS did not win the overall competition, Microsoft awarded the project team with an honorary cash prize to recognize their vision. EnvisionGood.tv had a chance to talk with Valery at the conference and learn how mobile phones and SMS are being used in Cameroon to help farmers: