November 15, 2012|By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times

NAIROBI, Kenya — Along Nairobi's dusty Ngong Road, so many start-up incubators and IT labs have popped up that the busy neighborhood has been nicknamed "Silicon Savannah."

Techies, geeks and innovators race one another to come up with the next big thing. They rush from meeting to meeting, work late, skip weekends. Every other day there's a pitch night for tech start-ups, a creative Web workshop, or a meeting of mobile app developers.