BarCamp Zim
Posted inBroadband Connectivity Startups

Startup Challenge – A chance for Zim startups to win US $25,000 in prizes

On 3 August (just some 9 days away), BarCamp Zimbabwe will be held in Harare. The event is for tech startups, geeks, entrepreneurs and generally the whole tech community in Zimbabwe. We’re excited about it. We’ve longed for tech startup events like this one and we feel this will take tech in Zim to another level. It will spark bigger things, bigger events and hopefully attract some investment into great ideas and great people.
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Posted inConnectivity Startups

Zimride: The Silicon Valley Start-up inspired by Zimbabwe

In 2005 Zimbabwe was halfway through it’s nearly decade long economic crunch. Hyper inflation was well on its way to breaking records in an experience few would want to relive. If the timely adage that necessity is the mother of all invention holds true, then the following story is a perfect indicator of the ‘greatness’ that can be found in or through Zimbabwe.
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Posted inBroadband

PowerTel to launch mobile voice services, web hosting

PowerTel Communications, the state owned subsidiary of national power company, ZESA, is set to launch mobile voice services on its network. PowerTel sales and marketing manager, Willard Nyagwande made the announcement at a function in Harare yesterday.
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Posted inConnectivity

Airtel, MTN and four others court Netone

According to a story by Godfrey Marawanyika on Bloomberg, Reward Kangai, the CEO of Netone has revealed that the company has been approached by six foreign investors with four having communicated within the last two weeks. Of the six, Bharti Airtel and MTN Group are front runners as they are spread across more African countries than any other operator on the continent.
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Posted inBroadband Connectivity

Consumer rights and Zimbabwe’s telecoms sector

A free market economy is a sound development catalyst as jobs, opportunities and wealth are created. Unfortunately; as has been the case with anything unbalanced, capitalism can be downright devastating if left to its own devices. One cannot help but to think of scandals like Enron, Worldcom, Renaissance Zimbabwe and numerous others. Insatiable greed is a reality. Conversely too much government control in any economy can result in stagnation due to a lack of incentive and purpose. A fine balance of the two is a trusted success formula.
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Posted inConnectivity

Africa’s Telecoms Titans: Vodacom Group

Africa’s Telecoms Titans is a series by Techzim profiling the top 20 leading mobile operators on the continent. Each segment focuses on a specific mobile operator with insights into services provided including marketing and technical competencies.
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Posted inConnectivity

Price of an eTXT SMS down to 5 cents

When Econet launched eTXT in March this year, we praised the service for innovation in a space that no other provider is playing; linking basic mobile phones to internet services like Email, Facebook and instant messaging. With a mobile phone just capable of SMS and voice calls, subscribers could now effectively send emails, respond to chats and post to their Facebook wall.
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Posted inConnectivity

Econet chairman: Cut us some slack, we’re doing the best we can

Econet had an AGM on Friday which brought out very interesting information, Newsday has a story on this. For starters NetOne and TelOne reportedly owe a collective $70million; the said debt has been outstanding for a while now such that Econet has approached government to assist with recovering it. TelOne is acknowledged as admitting its liabilities and actually paying, albeit in small amounts. NetOne on the other hand is being taken to court.
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Posted inBroadband

What Zimbabweans expect of a ‘true 4G’ network

Last week, Spiritage (well, their Brodacom subsidiary) posed the question: What would you expect from a true4G network? This is a bold question to ask. Indeed it’s a bold statement in itself; it authoritatively declares that Brodacom is here to offer genuine 4G. It’s bold in that, even in developed economies, large telcos claiming to offer 4G services are being asked to back their 4G claims with some real facts or cease the advertising. Just next door in South Africa, Cell C was forced to pull its 4Gs advertising after MTN and Vodacom lodged complaints with the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa accusing Cell C of misleading the consumers.
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Posted inMiscellaneous

Western Union introduces domestic money transfer

Techzim has just found out that Western Union has been offering a domestic money transfer service since the 16th of May 2011. It appears as if not enough PR work was done in this regard as even an online search did not yield any information. The money transfer service enables locals to send and receive money within Zimbabwe without the need of a bank account. A receiver is able to access money within minutes of sending and is subject to agent locations. Western Union’s local agents are Microking (a subsidiary of Kingdom Bank), Easy Link, POSB, and FFS.
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Posted inConnectivity

Global weekly roundup: Google Plus, Kenya Open Data and more

On 7 July, Kenya became the first Africa country to launch the Open Data initiative. Kenya will make some government data available online through a platform called Socrata, which allows users to view different data at national, county and constituency levels. Users can manipulate the views of the data in various ways and can even create maps from it.
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Posted inBroadband Connectivity

Brodacom’s “Reserve Your Number” finally up. Brodacom.com now down

Yesterday, when we posted an article about Spiritage’s new voice telephony and Internet company, Brodacom, we echoed the message from Brodacom’s adverts that you could reserve your number on the site www.reserveyournumber.co.zw which, Brodacom had promised, would be available at 1400hrs yesterday. It didn’t happen. And by the time we left the office yesterday, the number reservation system still wasn’t available.
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Posted inConnectivity

Social Media: What Facebook and Linkedin’s Africa partners are saying

After publishing a couple of articles focused on how local businesses are using and not using social media, we recently had a telephone interview with Adrian Hewlett to get an expert opinion. Adrian is the founder and CEO of the South African based Habari Group, which has a division (Habari Media) dedicated to Social Media sales and consultancy services. The company works directly with Facebook and LinkedIn across the African continent and has gained headway in prime markets like Nigeria and Kenya.
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Posted inConnectivity

Spiritage Introduces Brodacom; Mobile voice telephony and 4G Internet

Today, Spiritage Group introduced Brodacom, its new company that will offer new voice telephony and broadband internet services. A teaser advert appeared in the local papers yesterday and we incorrectly attributed the new services to Valley Technologies, a Spiritage owned internet access provider. And as we have learned today, the services are actually under the new company and brand.
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Posted inConnectivity

Interview with Big Law CEO. Company pioneering investor relations websites in Zimbabwe

We contacted the Big Law CEO, Rob Strangroom, to get some information about the company and the work they do. Big Law is one of the few companies working on a problem that is widespread in Zim and other similar countries. The problem is that companies, listed or not, don’t seem to see the power of the internet as a business platform even as internet penetration increases rapidly across the continent.
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