Posted inHardware & Software
Posted inConnectivity Startups
ZOL Startup Challenge Finalists: FUNZA
Funza is an online recruitment platform targeted at grassroots recruitment. It is the only concept stage startup to qualify for the finals. Escar concludes will also provide its development, placement and consultancy services in the greater sub-region.
Posted inConnectivity Startups
Financial Express: a startup takes aim at Goliath
Not too long ago, Kabweza and l met Tommy Deuschle of Big Africa - a start-up that has gone through many pivots. According to Tommy, the current focus of the company is to become a virtual startup/business accelerator by leveraging on the power of relationships in business. His aim is to create a self sustaining network of businesses that compliment and consolidate each other. One of these startups that Big Africa is a part of is Finx (Financial Express).
Posted inConnectivity
ZOL Startup Challenge Finalists: Sadomba-Mahari, AvisPar
The idea of the AvisPar Visual Package was conceived by Kudzai Sadomba, a gaming developer with, according to the startup, 10 years of programming experience. Sadomba Mahari pitched the AvisPar suite of applications at the Startup Challenge in Harare on 03 August 2011, and secured a place in the 5 finalists battling it out for the top prize on 08 September 2011.
Posted inConnectivity
TelOne is looking for a hundred million dollars, full stop
Back in March this year, Zimbabwe’s telecoms regulator, POTRAZ, revealed that it had granted TelOne the fourth GSM license in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean government now effectively has two GSM licenses as a result. The other is through NetOne. A GSM license is a treasured asset world over, more so in Africa where mobile telephony uptake has been nothing short of a revolution in recent years.
Posted inConnectivity Startups
ZOL Startup Challenge Finalists: Softwarehouse – Hardware Inventory
Hardware Inventory is a proprietary Windows based application developed by Softwarehouse, a local startup that began on the back of their Quickstem Suite-a floriculture management software that has been used by farmers in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, and the Netherlands among others. Quickstem was beginning to gain traction until the global recession resulted in less demand for the product, combined with local challenges the flower growing sector has faced locally.
Posted inBroadband Connectivity
Econet adds mobi version to EconetMail. Our thoughts on it
About 3 weeks ago, a contact at Econet informed us that Econet is launching a mobile version of the EconetMail service. The address is econetmail.mobi. We have since tried out. Our opinion is that it’s not a great product. In fact it’s just not a good product right now. See, the mobile version is just another face to what, at the core, still is a product with issues.
Posted inConnectivity
Getting it right: The new Olivine website
Recently, Olivine, one of Zimbabwe’s most known brands, launched its website. The website is on www.olivine.co.zw. Now I can hear some of you say, "So what, a lot of non-tech companies launch cool websites every!” Yes, they do. But this one is different. It’s one for those few cases when a company just gets it right. More right than most (if not all) of the most known tech companies around.
Posted inBroadband Connectivity
Domain registration in Zimbabwe: Interview with ZISPA chairman
We promised to post an interview we had with current ZISPA chairman, Troy Prinsloo, on these issues. We had it a couple of weeks ago. It’s a long interview and we had to cut out parts we felt didn’t contribute much to the subject. It still remained long so if you don’t have the time to read through all of it, here are main points discussed.
Posted inConnectivity
Africa’s Telecoms Titans: France Telecom-Orange
Orange is the key brand of France Telecom, the world’s 5th largest mobile operator by subscribers. France Telecom is a converged communications provider with a large presence in the mobile space and diverse fixed line, content, infrastructure, venture capital and value added services. The operator’s roots stretch back to the 18th century. It has evolved from a state owned monopoly into a top 5 global telecommunications player.
Posted inConnectivity
Question of the day: Any legal issues with selling pirated software?
We have a Question & Answer platform here on Techzim, where visitors can post tech-related questions and get answers from the community. We try to be there a lot posting answers as well, but we don’t know everything, so it’s really the Zimbabwe tech community (thank you guys, macd, TechGuru, FREEWORLD and all you anonymous fellows!) driving the platform.
Checking the site today, I was met with the question “any legal issues with selling pirated software(.e.g. Say from torrents)?
Posted inConnectivity Startups
ZOL Startup Challenge Finalists: Ribe Networks
Ribe Networks is a local chat application that has set its sight on disrupting internet based messaging. It intends to do so by offering users across all mainstream mobile and pc platforms the ability to interact with peers through the lightweight and locally hosted Ribe Chat application. Users can link their Ribe account to Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, MSN, Yahoo Mail and others.
Posted inBroadband Connectivity Startups
Startups: The International Telecoms Union is waiting for your pitch
Two weeks ago, ITU (the International Telecoms Union) launched a global competition that seeks to give 60 Young Innovators and Digital Innovators the chance to travel to its flagship event, ITU Telecoms World in Geneva (October 24-27). Entrants will be able to pitch their ground-breaking ideas to leaders of the world’s ICT industry. Techzim would have wanted to publish this sooner however we have just found out about it. And it's not too late!
Posted inBroadband
New CEO at Seacom as Brian Herlihy steps down
Seacom, African submarine fibre cable system operator, announced that Brian Herlihy is stepping down as CEO and will be replaced by Mark Simpson. Mark Simpson takes over the reins next week on 5 Septmber 2011.
Posted inConnectivity
Why the Harare Agriculture Show should have internet presence
Publicity for the show is abundant on traditional media platforms like TV, radio and local newspapers. There’s enough coverage of the exhibition on these media to attract paying show goers and (in-turn) to provide optimum business benefit to exhibitors. Attendance for the exhibition is always in the tens of thousands, and sometimes (likely the case this year) spilling into more than a hundred thousand. For all this success, you would expect the HAS to have some kind of official presence on the internet. It does not.
Posted inConnectivity
Electricity infrastructure & ICTs: Zesa’s 31% tariff increase
The Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) has come up with what it believes is a grand plan to vanquish power cuts (also known as Load Shedding) from the great lands between the Limpopo and Zambezi river. After much thought and strategising, the engineers and boffins at the parastatal have come to the conclusion that a 31% increase of tariffs is the answer.
Posted inConnectivity Startups
Startup Challenge: One swallow doth not a summer make!
I thought it important to share with you my recent experiences as a judge at the inaugural Zimbabwe Tech Start-Up Challenge. First of all go take a look at "3 more finalists are selected for the Start-Up Challenge" which will give you a good idea of what happened. Part one is on this link!
The long and the short of it is that the innovation and skills that were on show far exceeded my expectations, which were admittedly pretty low, but nevertheless……
Posted inConnectivity
Zimbabwe’s ‘breakout’ search terms on Google this month
This month, four breakout searches registered on Google and all four are for the late Retired General Solomon Mujuru. Here’s a screenshot of part of the Google insights for Search for the month:
Posted inConnectivity
TelOne responds to allegations of mismanagement
Three days ago, the Zimbabwe Mail, a local news website ran a story titled “TelOne on the brink of collapse”. The story accused the TelOne management of running down the fixed line telecoms operator due to “gross-mismanagement in the face of stiff competition from mobile phone operators”.
Posted inBroadband Connectivity
Econet provides free unlimited Wi-Fi internet at Agric show
As you may probably know, The Harare Agriculture show is in full swing right now. The annual show is Zimbabwe’s largest agriculture exhibition and attracts even businesses from non-agric sectors. One such is Econet, Zimbabwe’s largest telecoms firm.
