Joshua Wanyama, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Joshua Wanyama is the founder of African Path Communications. African Path is an online portal company that includes African Path, African Path Village, African Path TV and Cheetah Index. African Path, allows Africans to own and tell their own stories on the global stage. African Path Village provides further interaction between site visitors through a social networking platform, African Path TV streams video programming and music on Africa and the Cheetah Index provides coverage of business news within the continent.

Joshua Wanyama (photo: White African)

Born in Nairobi, Kenya; Joshua Wanyama received a B.S. in Architecture at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2003. Immediately upon completion of his college degree, he started Spectrum Interactive Media, LLC. A web design and development company in Minneapolis, MN. He left the company in 2007 in order to concentrate on African Path, a portal that had been built in partnership with Spectrum Interactive.

In the fall of 2007, Mr. Wanyama assisted in the planning and branding of the Pan African Trade and Investment Summit in Minneapolis that promoted trade between Africa and companies in Minnesota. He currently sits on the board of the South African Minnesota Business Council.

In a speech given at the 2009 TED Global meeting, he said about interconnectivity in Africa, “In my life, I have found that I can combine two things that bring me great pleasure – business and design into a real solution that is relevant to Africa. This would not have been possible without the web. And I know there are a lot more solutions and opportunities within the continent that will keep springing forth daily. Whether online or offline, interconnectedness will play a huge role in the success of these ventures. And with that, we will be able to improve Africa while presenting a balanced view of it to the world at large. And in a world growing darker with the storms of economic upheaval, Africans have a chance to stand up and lead in their own way.”

He is also the co-founder of Pamoja Media, Africa’s first online advertising network-selling, banner and rich-media advertising to marketers seeking to reach Africans worldwide. Since its inception in August of 2008, Pamoja Media has proved its value to publishers by working with some of Africa’s major publications including the Nation Media Group of Kenya, Mmegi of Botswana, Sahara Reporters of Nigeria, Mail & Guardian of South Africa and Sudanese Online amongst others. In October of 2008, Pamoja Media started representing Yahoo’s Network in Africa selling its inventory to marketers within the continent. Pamoja Media today boasts a reach of 35 million Africans worldwide through its network and Yahoo.

June Arunga – A Most Creative Person

June Arunga has been voted one of 100 Most Creative People by Fast Company.  She is currently an equity partner with Black Star Lines, a company that She convinced she persuaded Chinery-Hesse (dubbed the Bill Gates of Africa) to join forces with to create a mobile-payment network for business owners.

You can learn more about her vision from the video below.

Ushahidi – Good Enough to be on Forbes

Forbes had the good taste to talk about a website that has impacted the way we look at citizen reporting in times of crisis. The site is Ushahidi. It was, for some Kenyans, the only way we could keep up with the situations that were going on in Kenya during the riots after the 2007 elections.

Ory Okolloh

It also helped the Red Cross know where to go to help people in need. This is the kind of stuff that we like to hear technology being used for (especially in the sad aftermath of the Mumbai hostage situation where we find out that they used satellite phones and Blackberrys).

Congratulations to Ory and Hash for being the visionary pioneers that gave Africans the voice in crisis. Kenyan Jewels is proud of you. Keep doing us proud and we will keep shouting out the accolades.

Mwende Window Snyder – San Francisco, California

Mwende Window Snyder

Mwende Window Snyder is Chief Security Officer at Mozilla Corporation. She is co-author of Threat Modeling, a standard manual on application security.

Snyder was Director of Security Architecture at @stake and was a senior security strategist at Microsoft in the Security Engineering and Communications organization, most notably as security lead and signoff on Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003. After leaving Microsoft in 2005, she worked as a principal, founder and CTO at Matasano Security LLC. She joined Mozilla in September 2006.

She has a blog on Mozilla.