(Photos courtesy of Daudi Were)

On the 21st of February we had our MoMo meet up. To say the attendance was amazing would be an understatement, with over 40 students from JKUAT attending and a total attendance of 200 this was by far the largest MoMo meet up to date. Microsoft-EA came in strong with Vincent Mugambi, who described himself as the “Pastor Muiru” of Microsoft, in other words his an evangelist, a developer and platform evangelist to be precise. A few highlights from Vincent’s talk:

1. Microsoft has one of the largest cloud offerings in the market right now.
2. Mobile developers can leverage the cloud to build and deploy applications.
3. New features in Windows Mobile 7

Conrad Akunga of Virtual City joined Vincent to talk about the Imagine Cup. Conrad has been a judge for 3 years during the event when it was held in Kenya. He challenged developers to push the boundaries and come up with strong ideas and projects. “The era of the lone ranger is over..” was Conrad’s advice to developers, “work in teams..” was a message he emphasized. One thing he said caught my attention, “..don’t ever think your idea is completely unique..” most developers assume that their idea is very unique, in most cases someone else has thought of it before and probably tried to execute, the devil is in the details.

mLab (www.mlab.co.ke)

As part of the evening we had a quick introduction to the mLab team, led by John Kieti, a friend and colleague. John and I share common interests in technology and health, but I honestly have no idea why his twitter handle is @gmeltdown . The mLab, a mobile development incubator,will form a key component of spurring development in the mobile sector, a welcome addition for all those techies out there looking for a place to go from idea to product. The mLab is an initiative of InfoDev in collaboration with iHub, eMobilis. South Africa will also be launching an mLab over the next few weeks, I was very excited to learn that Steve Voosloo, formerly of the ShuttleWorth Foundation will be part of the team setting up the mLab.

Pivot25 (www.pivot25.co.ke)

Jay Bhalla also talked about Pivot25. Pivot25 gives companies the opportunity to showcase their applications to Operators, Venture Capital Community, Angel Investors and the ICT community at large, and at the same time the chance win prize money for their Companies and Applications. Applications are due midnight (East-Africa time) March 31st, 2011. To enter the competition please view the rules and instructions. We advise you to be as detailed as possible and fill as much of the application criteria as possible.

ELMA

Kamal Budhabhatti, CEO-Craft Silicon took a few minutes to talk about ELMA. ELMA is a a mobile commerce platform that allows programmers to develop business applications rapidly. Developers can build robust applications fully integrated with a payment gateway. Definitely watch for Craft Silicon, they seem on the right path.

Kirui, a student from JKUAT wrote a more detailed blog posts recapping the event. check out http://kiruikenn.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/mobile-monday-with-microsoft-how-it-went-down/

This event was a success by any measure. We managed to impact students who will form the next generation of developers and entrepreneurs. Check out more photos here http://goo.gl/mjecn Look out for bigger and better things from the MOMOKE team.