Econet Wireless Zimbabwe has announced that it’s now selling Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4, in its Harare and Bulwayo stores. So far, the price revealed is US $900 cash. Ads in the press and the company’s Facebook page say however that payment options are available in the stores.
Microblogging tool, Tumblr, will soon have new owners if a deal for a US $1.1 billion cash acquisition consummates. The deal was approved by the Yahoo board yesterday. Tumblr was founded in 2007 by now 26 year old entrepreneur, David Karp, who is also the CEO
Apparently BlackBerry is just discovering now that if they could have looked beyond just inside their ecosystem 1for the growth of its much loved BlackBerry Messenger, they could have made it to the top messaging position WhatsApp occupies today.
Following last week’s intense verbal fencing we are pleased to announce that the jury is back and we have the results. Now before I start to gloat and tell you I told you so here is a summary of the results:
Yesterday, we asked our followers on Facebook a question: If you had unlimited broadband at unlimited speeds, what would you use it for?
When in February we published the first article about Brainstorm, a startup that brings exam revision material to students via a mobile web service, the founder of the service told us that though they were charging a cent a question for the service; they were looking into ways to make it free for any student…
The money system is broken, and no one knows that better than the Zimbabwean who watched helplessly as institutions – government, politicians, bankers – they trusted to look after the value of their money conspired and eroded hard earned savings to nothing over a few years.
What would have happened if subscribers hadn’t taken to social media to complain? What about if this had affected just 50 people who all didn’t notice? How do we even know this was the first time? What mechanisms does POTRAZ have in place to ensure these glitches are detected when they happen? Does POTRAZ audit…
The saying that content is king precedes the internet and can likely be traced as far back as the age of Papyrus. Engaging, enriching and current content is what drives the information age. Once a local flavor is brought to the table, consumption patterns grow at an exponential rate.
The annual Zimbabwe Golf Open is always a great time (and place) to buy Africom gadgets. See, Africom always has a booth at the tournament and they basically sell devices at giveaway.
Close to two weeks ago, we received a test unit of the Econet Huawei mobile Wi-Fi device for review. Being a small operation ourselves, we decided to start using it as our primary office connection since then so that we speak about the reliability, stability, speed and other things from a point of actually having…
A post on Facebook by local web & mobile app development company, C2 Media, just announced that an Android app for Zimbabwe’s biggest arts festival, HIFA is now live. The app is free. For many lovers of the annual festival (those on Android at least) this solves a huge information pain.
To improve availability and speed of the site, we migrated Techzim to new hosts a few weeks ago. Last time we did this was about 2 years ago when we moved the site from local Zim hosts.
I still remember the ZOL startup of 2010 like it was yesterday. A room filled to the with young and ambitious talent that wanted to make a difference and bring back their country from out of the cold limbo of the just past decade long crisis. Fast forward to today and many of those startups…
I watched in disbelief as my local transformer blew up in flames for what must surely be the upteenth time in little over a month. I could not fathom the cause for such incompetence as this was also the upteenth new transformer ZESA had installed. My friend however had a perfectly rational explanation as always:
It’s happening elsewhere but given the technological challenges of the older generation as compared with their children and counterparts, child controlling apps are still to gain traction here in Zimbabwe.
Last night, I was taken aback by the way that Econet Wireless was handling, or rather not handling, its very serious service delivery crisis. Since Saturday evening, subscribers have been expressing frustration and anger at the strange and unexplained disappearance of their airtime. From the people I have spoken to, people who had topped up…
Zimbabwean internet providers relying on the onward fibre connectivity of SEACOM and EASSy, two of Africa’s major undersea cables, are facing major problems delivering internet services to customers as the the two cables have been down for close to 4 days
A local start-up called Provlabs has developed a solution that enables individuals looking to get a Zimbabwean learner’s drivers license to practice for the test on their PCs. The application, which we had an opportunity to check out, is a test simulator with over 650 questions, 300 diagram questions and time limit controls in much…
News has reached us that those we have tasked with fighting corruption are in fact themselves corrupt. This coupled with the fact that me and a couple of hundred other people were asked to contribute a dollar each, ostensibly for a ZESA team’s transport, after a transformer blew up in my area can be considered…
Yesterday we attended the launch by Econet of a new solar charger/lantern/radio combo product called the Power Lantern SW015. The product is an improvement of the lantern that was on the market which, according to Econet Services CEO, Darlington Mandivenga, the company sold 400,000 of.
If you visited the Techzim website on Saturday, you were probably met with an error indicating the site couldn’t load. It wasn’t just you; we were down for most of Saturday. The issue was a hosting one, and it’s the longest we’ve been offline because of hosting problems since launch. We’re sorry for this and…
When I was a college student every semester was a small matter of two heads of cattle in terms of fees cost. These were the days when campus accommodation was no longer available so there was transport costs to add to that.