• Terms and conditions apply?

    Ever since I could write I have been asked to append my signature to so many countless documents I have lost count. From the Post Office Savings Bank’s little green book when I was a kid to my current lease agreement.

  • South African government charged US $10 million for a WordPress theme job

    It happens all the time but this is definitely extreme. South African tech blogs reported that a web development company actually charged the South African government at least R97 million for a website. The website is basically just WordPress (free) and a WordPress theme (about $40) that they clearly didn’t modify much. Here’s a screenshot…

  • Wabona and the internet opportunity for pay-per-view video streaming in Africa

    We were recently in touch with Simukayi Mukuna, one of the two co-founders of a new pay-per-view video streaming service called Wabona. The service was launched in beta in November last year, and the Wabona team has since been accepted into a 88mph startup incubator in South Africa. it was great opportunity therefore for us…

  • Brainstorm: Startup brings exam revision material to students via mobile

    Their mission is clear, and 25,000 Facebook fans in just a few months is testament to the need for the service: Helping students excel in school by providing useful revision tools and information. And they couldn’t have launched at a better time.

  • The Google Tax: is it justified?

    The internet has been described as a global system of interconnected computer networks that makes use a suite of protocols to serve billions of users worldwide.

  • Why translation of open source software into local languages has failed

    Sometime in 2009, after quenching my thirst with (Ubuntu) Linux for two years I decided it was time to give back to the community. I am not a very talented code writer, I know that much, nor did i see any reason to wast whatever few talents I had on the oversubscribed international Ubuntu Community…

  • CultureShift Zimbabwe tech and cultural sector challenge – Ideation Day 2

    Day 2 of the Culture Shift Zimbabwe ideation was held yesterday. The main purpose of the day was for teams of techies and cultural people to form teams based on solutions that they want to work on. It was really great watching the ideas come together, additional features suggested and lumped into the solution, then…

  • CultureShift Zimbabwe tech and cultural sector challenge – Ideation Day 1

    Today was the first of the two day Culture Shift Ideation, an event to get software developers, designers, creative arts people and entrepreneurs to find solutions to problems in the arts sector that can be solved by technology. It was great having individuals and organisations from the arts side get to learn of the possibilities…

  • Press Release: Pastel launches cloud computing for small businesses

    Pastel Software Zimbabwe will on March 12 launch Sage Pastel My Business Online, a cloud‑based accounting programme designed for start-up and small businesses that enables them to do their accounts online from anywhere in the world. This web-based business software solution can be accessed from anywhere using a computer, iPad, smartphone or even an iPhone,…

  • Appfrica announces 2012 Apps4Africa business challenge winners

    Appfrica announced today the winners of the 2012 Apps4Africa business app challenge. The three winners of the 3rd edition of the challenge are startups from Nigeria, Uganda and Ghana. Each of the three will get US $10,000. The winning startups were selected from a list of 30 finalists announced 3 weeks ago.

  • Mxit to host the premiere of full-length feature film

    In what is set to be a first for social networks, Mxit announced today the exclusive premiering of full-length feature film on its mobile social network. A South African feature film called A Lucky Man will start showing exclusively on the network. The movie will be available via a Mxit app called Cinemo.

  • Econet reduces international call tariffs to local rates

    Econet Wireless the largest telecoms firm in Zimbabwe has slashed the tariffs on calls to 5 international destinations to local rates. In adverts published in the local print press, the company announced that subscribers can now call South Africa, United Kingdom, USA, China and Canada at 24 cents per minute.

  • Microsoft wakes up to new Africa, reacts with youth empowerment initiative

    To Microsoft Africa has traditionally been a place to sell its enterprise software products. Through local partners yes, but the continent was primarily a place to push products to. I imagine they were not making much owing chiefly to the piracy of its products on the market and so far it looks their concern about…

  • An open source national economic development model inspired by WordPress

    Although the Zimbabwean economy is now stable, several companies continue to close and the unemployment rate as we know it is still over 80%. While open source mostly refers to software, I believe it can also apply to economic development programmes and that such programmes can play a huge role.

  • You don’t need to be an engineer to start a technology business

    Gary Shayne who founded Cellular Systems, later renamed Celsys, which he listed on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange when he was only 27 years old and went on to sell to Lonrho was a chartered accountant, and not a telecommunications engineer. Sure there were many telecommunications engineers who knew telecommunications, and who could boast more experience…

  • Discourse: A reinvention of web forums

    For those not familiar with the name Jeff Atwood, he is the co-founder of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, the former being arguably the best computer programming Q&A site on the interwebs. After establishing the site into the success it is today, Atwood left the company to focus on another problem he had identified with…

  • Saving mobile phone data

    In the previous installment several suggestions were made on how to reduce bandwidth consumption on a capped connection. Whilst this article focused solely on PCs the rise in the use of smartphones has led to headaches as people try to manage data bundles on their smartphones and tablets. This is not helped by the fact…

  • Culture Shift Zim: Calling cultural folks, developers, designers & all the geeks in between

    A wave of digital innovation is currently seeping Africa and at the same time, causing a sea change in the conventional thinking on the role of technology, innovation, creative economies and development. Culture Shift Zimbabwe will challenge entrepreneurs to find creative new ways to benefit from the digital shift and respond to local market challenges…

  • Living with data caps in Zimbabwe

    If we lived in a perfect world, all of us would have an unlimited internet connection on which you could do anything from video conferencing, watching movies and playing internet games. Of course such a connection does exist – you could obtain one from a provider locally but you’d have to give them your first…

  • WeChat is better than WhatsApp

    Just before Christmas I got a sponsored link on my Facebook wall begging me to download and install an application called WeChat. I normally don’t look at those invites, no matter how tempting they sound. But being on my annual leave on a hot, slow December afternoon, I just thought, why not have a look.

  • Legitimate uses of BitTorrent

    Since its inception in 2001 BitTorrent has come a long way. From being a fringe protocol to being the defacto peer-to-peer standard. The total number of active monthly BitTorrent users has been estimated to be more than a quarter of a billion.

  • Want some Zim comedy on mobile? Carl Ncube just released an app

    We didn’t know about version 1 but we’ve just been notified of the second version of Carl Joshua Ncube’s app and after briefly checking it out, we loved it. Well, the Android version that we used at least. There’s an iPhone (and other devices) a Windows Phone version of the app as well. It’s all…

  • Social media lessons from Zimbabwe’s mobile operators (Updated)

    A lot can change in a year – especially in Zimbabwe. In 2011 very few of Zimbabwe’s established brands seemed to have a presence on Facebook (Twitter “didn’t exist” yet). Today’s marketing landscape has significantly changed as a number of savvy brands finally understand how and why social media matters to their marketing mix.

  • Startup talk: the value of a brand

    Although it might not be apparent at first, one of the most common reasons why startups fail is because of the inability by the founders to create a recognisable, respected and indispensable brand-a cult brand. A brand is a “name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as…

  • Someone should make a platform independent message search tool

    I’m as excited about the potential of Facebook’s Graph Search as I’m sure most people are, so I’ve signed up and await my turn in the queue. And like most people, even with its blatant bias, I hoped Google’s Search plus your World would result in better overall search results.

  • Most popular passwords of 2012

    During my brief stint in IT one of the most common complaints was that my password complexity restrictions were too stringent. People had to come up with a password they could remember and “+.^_]$”9lQd@7fW” does not cut the list.

  • Learn programming APIs with Codecademy

    Last year we featured an article about how the world of online learning was quickly outpacing conventional methods of learning and transforming into the main gateway for students who want to learn new subjects quickly and at their own pace.

  • About Yookos, its SMS adverts, and its place in the social networking space (interview)

    Trying Yookos hasn’t been easy and I would’ve just given up had I not been on a blogging mission. See, when you sign up it says the verification email’s been sent to your mailbox, but doesn’t actually send it until you attempt to login with the unverified account and instruct it to send the email.…

  • Zimbo Jam finally comes back online. Her Zimbabwe still down

    We are noticing that the Zimbo Jam website, which has been offline for close to 2 weeks to recover from the defacement incident, came back online today. The website is Zimbabwe’s most popular entertainment blog (blogazine if you want) and one of high profile local websites to be hit in recent weeks.

  • Another high profile website hacked, this time it’s Fingaz

    We have been alerted by readers to the hacking of yet another high profile website in Zimbabwe, that of the Financial Gazette, www.financialgazette.co.zw. Our checks show that the website was hacked on Friday, 4 January 2013, and remains compromised at the time of posting this article.