Ever been to Dongle-wanaland?
Posted inBroadband

Ever been to Dongle-wanaland?

If you either hated history or fell asleep halfway through the lesson; Gondwanaland was a great big continental block that contained what we refer to as Africa, India, Australia, and other sub-continents. Its existence is based on theoretical assumptions related to the earth’s evolution.
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Posted inConnectivity

More than 1.6 million Econet subscribers have registered for Ecolife

Last week, Econet’s Namibian partner, Trustco Group Holdings, revealed that by 31 March this year, 1.6 million Econet subscribers had registered for the Ecolife insurance service. That’s more than 30% of Econet’s total subscribers. The information was made available at the announcement of Trustco financial results by Head of Corporate Strategy, Desnei Leaf-Camp. Here’s an extract of Leaf-Camp’s statement:
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Posted inBroadband

ICT incumbents, the times they are a-changin’

I’ve met more than enough Zimbabweans (geeks and ordinary humans alike) who feel that the local ICT sector is not up to scratch. When asked to specify what being “up to scratch” is, most immediately and rather animatedly set off an explosive cache of various beliefs, facts and figures. However correct some of the well informed opinion holders may be, there are a few cold facts that have rendered their sentiments to the confines of wishful thinking. They are as follows:
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Posted inConnectivity Startups

Local startup launches Dariro.com, a local pages platform

A few days ago we visited Dariro, a new startup building what we can describe as a ‘local pages’ web platform. The website is still in beta and it’s live on Dariro.com. The website also provides a platform for developers to build their own applications. The Dariro founder is Richwell Phinias, an internet marketing entrepreneur.
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Posted inConnectivity Startups

Social Media: Winky D is the Big Man

Winky D shot to stardom in a manner that left many recovering from his mesmerising impact. From the dusty streets of Kambuzuma he has risen to defy all established conventions by taking over local airwaves, entertainment systems, and many an iPod/mp3 player. Before his emergence, Dancehall was a niche genre for Rastafarians and hardcore fanatics; he has not only transformed this but created a very compelling mainstream brand.
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Posted inConnectivity

WeTab tablet now available in Zim through an official 4tiitoo partner

Last week, a Harare company called William Over called us over to have a feel of the WeTab tablet, a device they just got exclusive reseller partnership for in the southern Africa region. The tablet is made by a German company called 4tiitoo. It was covered on international tech blogs like Engadget and arstechnica starting mid last year and got quite some positive reviews.
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Posted inConnectivity Startups

The Old Mutual Entrepreneurs’ guide that you should check out

A Twitter friend pointed us to the dogreatthings.co.za resource the other day. This site is called Old Mutual Entrepreneurs guide. It provides a collection of lessons (you can call it wisdom) delivered by seasoned entrepreneurs. They basically share what they have learnt in their journey building successfully companies in Africa.
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Posted inStartups

23rd Century Systems: Lessons on building a Pan African ICT company

At the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce symposium held last week, Twenty Third Century Systems(TTCS) Group Business Development Manager, Thandi Ngwenya presented on an interesting topic: Building a Pan African ICT Company. In the presentation Ngwenya says she shares some “5 key lessons that we have learnt in our journey to establish TTCS as a global ICT player.”
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Posted inBroadband

The Econet backbone optic fibre map

We saw the map below in Econet's financial results briefings for 2011 and thought to post it here. It shows the progress of the fibre backbone project that the largest mobile operators is working. As you can see, the section running from Harare through Bulawayo to Beitbridge is now fully operational. It also shows the fibre rings in Harare and Bulawayo have been completed.
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Posted inBroadband

Set up your own home Wi-Fi with these simple steps

This guest post was authored by Tapiwa Mapani. He’s not a trained geek and says “I just have a restless mind that makes me experiment with this type of stuff and most of the time to great success.” He has a wireless network setup at his home office which uses a mobile broadband USB dongle and a wireless router. He shares how you can setup a similar wireless network.
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Posted inConnectivity

NetOne cancels Zellco contract. What next for Zellco?

Starting last week, NetOne has been making statements in the press notifying Zellco NetOne subscribers that the relationship with Zellco, its service provider, has been severed. As a NetOne service provider, Zellco signed up new post-paid customers and collected revenue on behalf of NetOne for a fee.
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Posted inBroadband

Press release: Telecel gives all customers pilot project data access

Telecel customers with data capable handsets are now able to access data services as part of a new phase of Telecel’s data services preparatory pilot project. The latest phase, which began on Friday (May 13), is intended to enable Telecel to test its data services billing system and the national reach of its data services capability.
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Posted inStartups

Matamba Anonaka, Zimbabwe’s tech focused venture capital firm

We’ve been pointed to the existence of a tech focused venture capital firm in Zimbabwe. We’re delighted. This is the kind of development Zim’s tech startups need; the possibility of their ideas and skills getting some financial support. I know a lot of people that have been praying for this.
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Posted inConnectivity Startups

Zimbos: Stake your claim in the startup goldrush

I believe that Zimbabwe and Kenya are similar in many ways albeit Kenya’s coastal advantage with regards to bandwidth access. As such the future is almost predictable provided the local infrastructure shapes up. We have a much higher literacy rate than Kenya with their only difference being that they have embraced tech in a huge and ubiquitous way. Everyone from the vendor on the street corner to SMEs and right up to policy makers are welcoming the info age with open arms.
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Posted inConnectivity

About spam and Dipleague archives on the internet

It’s clear that Dipleague is one of the most useful classifieds services in Zimbabwe. We’ve covered Dipleague here before. It’s a basic mailing list; simple but very effective. The list generates close to 500 adverts a day! There’s something we don’t like about Dipleague: the vulnerability of members (posting ones) to spam, phishing and all the evils that unscrupulous characters use on unsuspecting internet & email users.
Posted inConnectivity

Zimbabwe’s telecoms industry revenue to grow to US1.34 billion by 2016

According to a market research report released today by global research firm, Frost & Sullivan, Zimbabwe’s mobile communications revenue will reach US $ 1.3 billion by 2016, with 20.1% compound annual growth rate. The report comes after Econet, Zimbabwe’s largest telecoms firm, released its year end financials showing solid growth and annual revenue of half a billion US dollars. Econet’s revenue in the previous period was US$362.8 million. Econet commands about 70% of Zimbabwe’s mobile telephony market.
Posted inConnectivity

Econet fixes website access issue. Our thoughts on customer support

Last week, we complained that we couldn’t connect to the Econet websites unless we used an Econet Internet connection. We don’t use Econet for Internet at the office and we write about the mobile operator regularly so you can understand how it affected us. We were also not happy that this had gone on for months despite notifying Econet about it.
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Posted inConnectivity

Telecoms subscribers as guinea pigs – exiting the infinite loop

Subscribers have played a major role in the establishment of mobile voice and data service in the last decade, through the experiments of all the existing mobile operators, subscribers have been made to pay for services that most of the time did not offer them good service. Subscribers involuntarily became guinea pigs for the mobile operators. New services continue to be launched where the subscriber takes both the position of a guinea pig and a client bringing money into the business.
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