But because neither renovation nor innovation did catch up at the speed of our economic development, we crashed. And that's, like with every disrupting event, a tremendous opportunity. It forces us to rethink, because it pushes us beyond the tipping point we tried to avoid for so long.

Currently the not perfectly labelled crowdsourcing is associated with the negative touch of cheap designer specwork and lowest possible labour costs. Despite even that working very well commercially, the real potential will show itself in the next iterations of this trend:

The reason we have company structures and processes, and by now organizations that are being deemed not only too big to fail but also too big to run, is that it was the most efficient way since the industrial revolution. Hiring, training and retaining employees for the assembly line is certainly more effective than trying to build cars with different people each day.

But the web, just like with the music industry, accounting and even your x-ray exams, could do something remarkable to white collar work itself: Making it portable. And turn the whole system upside down. It's now way less complex to tell people who you are and what you need than to tell them what to do. There are tons of people out there who know exactly what they're doing in their respective field. Smart people who even understand your most complex needs.

Using the web to describe whats needed and thus making work more liquid could launch an exceptional shift in how we work: Imagine being able to have the right talent at your fingertips, no matter what the tasks are about today. Or were yesterday. And will be tomorrow.

Imagine being able to design your day, every day: A Twitter style timeline containing work units that are customized to your real interests, expertise and aspirations, aggregated from sources and services around the world.

CrowdConf2011, the industry meeting this week in San Francisco, and the next wave of startups that work to advance those first steps into new areas are capable of changing the way we work forever, to a better. It may be a rough ride with some wrong turns. But I'm fully convinced and confident that whats lurking in there will benefit us all. Welcome to the journey, it has just begun.

Globe photo by James Halliday

30 minutes later I'm crossing a floor-mat welcoming me with "there's no place like 127.0.0.1." It's this side of East Africa this brief report is about and which brought me here, to the mobile revolution I had only read about, and to the IPO48 event with its great bunch of start-ups:

The Highlights

The event itself was a typical startup weekend: Attendees ranging from established teams to people who met for the first time on Friday evening. Two days of mentoring, nightly hacks and constant feedback followed, all leading to final presentations on Sunday evening.

Without further ado, the following teams personally impressed me most.

M-SAVE: Is just the kind of concept you come across in "mostly mobile" countries that makes you think, "Yeah, we might also have that. In three to five years." M-SAVE allows you to invest your current excess pre-paid airtime in stocks or funds, or take out a small loan, lets say for a quick lunch or because you don't have enough with you to make the purchase, all immediately via SMS.

MyOrder: Think of it as a Pago for Nairobi, that allows you to order from local shops before you arrive and skip waiting in line, but with two interesting added twists: Businesses can set up their own shop in seconds and use their existing mobile phones (SMS) or smartphones to have the whole workflow up and running. Shops can also create a list of dedicated delivery zones; for instance, if you're the cafeteria in a mixed-use building, you can let people order straight to their offices, meeting rooms, etc. This is a very strong product on AppEngine. Their process involved a gallery of dozens of talks with potential clients, represented by a photo of the business owner and the corresponding wireframe they jointly developed.

Tusquee: Nice business model: giving away a state of the art administration system to schools for free, but parents pay to check grades and attendance in real-time as well as some other info services like admission fee balance, etc. Also SMS-based.

Tutabeba: Local delivery service. Drop off your stuff at a designated partner, mostly shops, provide the mobile phone number of the recipient and the recipient can pick it up at a convenient location close to her. Little bit like Uber for goods. Also helps local businesses with only a single store to increase their reach across a whole metro area. What was most amazing about them: They met Friday evening, developed the idea, started working on it during the night and by Saturday at 9:00 a.m. were out the door talking to shop owners, people on the street and so on. By Sunday evening all that feedback was engineered into a first working prototype.

The Highlands

After two great days of having the privilege of getting involved in a broad range of ventures, and some really tough judging after that, last year's winners, M-Farm were kind enough to take me around town and to the Kenyan highlands a few hours north of Nairobi.

There, the obvious and most talked-about wonders became very real.

Mobile payments: Think about paying everything in seconds via MPesa. Literally everything, including the food stand, street-side car wash or auto body shop. Many of them don't have electricity, some of them have "no cash please" signs, but mobile payments are more ubiquitous than Square, Apple and Google combined will make them in the U.S. in the next 18 months.

Field-to-market: Farmers out in their fields can find out what their commodity is selling for right now at the main markets in Nairobi, a process whose lack of transparency formerly allowed middle-men to skim off money from the seller.

It's particularly impressive being told all of this as you walk to a farmer's small field, 7,000 ft. up the mountains, an hour away from his house. Especially if you just sought shelter from pouring rain in a simple hut, the farmhouse offered by the owners. While they go along their farming routines, kids and household work, they manage to cook hot milk for you, and put a simple clay pot on the plain clay floor, filled with glowing charcoal to warm you. When leaving, its perfectly normal to show your gratitude and compensate their expenses with, you guessed it, a cashless direct mobile payment.

Combine this leapfrogging culture with an average economic growth of 7.2% and it becomes obvious how much potential is around. Even if you don't intend to stay, do yourself a favor and book a flight to get a ton of inspiration for your mobile startup. Or, like me, at least shake off the remains of your skewed perceptions of a region whose global leadership in many aspects of mobile technology will eventually become undeniable to the world at large.

Nairobi photo by Brian Snelson

It's pretty obvious that they wouldn't have joined to staff a 24-hour Zynga hotline, but what exactly could be brewing over at Facebook HQ?

The way game development usually works today is that you license an engine (e.g. CryEngine) and a platform (e.g. Playstation). Facebook most likely wants to commoditize these basic building blocks by creating an entire open-source ecosystem, but with Facebook as a central social (and most likely monetization) layer baked right in.

Maybe that's also the reason Disney got into this early by buying Rocketpack : Being able to offer a turnkey solution they control.

The good news? If you grew up in the eighties and nineties, expect to soon be able to replay all of your 8- and 18-bit past in a browser near you, all the jump-and-runs, vertical scrollers and strategy games. Like, for example, CivWorld.

While back then even a basic walk-through meant a long and often futile march to the store, in the coming years all it will take to reach your friends and upgrade payments is a simple click.