The iCow mobile-phone app, invented by an organic farmer outside of Nairobi, Kenya, is just one example of the country's growing high-tech entrepreneurial culture. Love the name. From the Christian Science Monitor:

As an organic farmer outside of Nairobi, Su Kahumbu could see the challenge that her cattle-herding neighbors had in handling the expenses of their most precious assets, the female cow.

So, Ms. Kahumbu came up with iCow, a mobile-phone application that allows herders to register each individual cow, and to receive individualized text messages on their mobile phones, including advice for veterinary care and feeding schedules, a database of experts, and updated market rates on cattle prices. It's an example of how high technology can help out even in the low-tech business of agriculture, in which 80 percent of Kenyans make a living.

Charging a few shillings (a Kenyan shilling is worth about one cent) per SMS for iCow's services, or a few hundred shillings per month for a jerry-rigged wireless network may not seem, at first appearance, to be the way to make a typical African fortune. But on a continent with nearly a billion people, nearly half of whom have at least a basic form of technology in the form of a cell phone, small-scale low-cost technology solutions may become a huge area of growth for a large number of individual innovators.

"If we can only do what I'm trying to do with iCow, riding on the back of technology, we can make a huge impact on ordinary people's lives," says Kahumbu.

iCow.