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In a warehouse on the outskirts of Nairobi, the "Lord of the Ringtones" holds sway over a growing cellphone service empire amid an African explosion in mobile technology.
With 14 employees and a clever Middle Earth-inspired slogan, Ken Njoroge's two-year-old Cellulant firm has seized on the phenomenal surge in cellphone use and a ballooning desire for people to customise their handsets with distinctive rings.
"Mobile phones are getting more and more sophisticated," says the 31-year-old "lord", as Cellulant employees in oversized headphones dispatch song snippets and ditties to customers for 82 cents a ringtone.
"We've just found an untapped niche," Njoroge says.
From humble, hobbit-like beginnings in March 2004, the Nairobi-based company has become a major player in the Kenyan cellphone market, selling more than 220000 jingles last month alone.
Now, Njoroge is one of a growing number of innovative young entrepreneurs delivering entertainment, information and even romance to cellphone users, whose numbers have skyrocketed from 15000 in 1999 to 5,6-million at the end of last year.
Across the continent -- where subscribers have shot up from eight million in 2001 to more than 100-million, accounting for one in nine Africans -- the cellphone has become much more than a tool for basic communication.
In rural areas, where fixed telephone lines and computers are rare, farmers receive up-to-date commodities information via SMS from the Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange.
With access to daily fruit and vegetable market prices, farmers' profits are growing exponentially, says Mary Wambau, head of marketing at the exchange. "They can bargain for better prices because they know how much their commodity is worth in markets around them."
Economic boost
The rise of cellphones has given Kenya and countries like it a major economic boost as they struggle to meet United Nations development and poverty-reduction goals.
A 2005 report by the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research found that a 10% growth in cellphone users can raise a typical developing country's gross domestic product by 0,6%.
"The value of mobile phones to individuals in Africa is greater because other means of communication -- such as postal systems, fixed-line telephony and roads -- are often poor and inaccessible or expensive for a majority of the population," it said.
The report found that cellphone providers and operators "have been forced to learn and adapt to the innovative ways in which Africans, especially the poor and low income earners, use their mobiles".
And, as cellphone technology has improved and network coverage has expanded, "it has become a question of how to make the phone more relevant to the user", says Fiona Asonga, of Telecommunications Service Providers of Kenya.
In Kenya, entrepreneurs like Njoroge are betting that increasingly sophisticated users will want far more than just commodity prices from their cellphones.
A cellphone dating service, created by local entrepreneur Geoffrey Murage, has an estimated 38000 subscribers who create profiles, search for potential partners and start conversations through SMSs.
Murage said the service, which costs 40 cents per message, is popular with professionals who are too busy to search for romance in common social settings.
"This is a platform where people can meet and maybe find the love of their life using a small gadget," said Murage, who started the service in July. "People keep trying their luck, so it's also a good way to make money."
Computer-science students at the University of Nairobi are learning how to design their own "value-added services" in a nine-week course entitled Mobile Phone Programming for Entrepreneurs.
The class is taught by Nathan Eagle, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who says the traditional focus on computer programming has become increasingly misplaced.
"A lot of people here don't have access to computers," he says. "Mobile phones are the way they're getting connected."
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