Category Posts: Events

How under the sun do you launch a product, one of whose main points of interface with customers is the web, without having the web platform ready?

Today, 1 February 2012, is the commencement date for the southern Africa region Apps4Africa Climate Challenge. The challenge will run for 2 months to end of the 30th of March and invites African innovators to develop innovative, web-based and mobile technology solutions to local climate change challenges. According to the Apps4Africa website the challenge centers around the strategic themes that were debated and decided upon by world leaders at the 17th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP17) conference in South Africa last year. The challenge is sponsored by the US government.

Africa Exchange, an organisation working to promote regional and international trade and investment will be hosting an ICT event on the 10th of February (about a week from now) dubbed the “Meeting of Minds”. The event will be held in Harare and aims to bring together the ICT Ministry representatives and private players in the industry to discuss development strategies for the sector.

Alpha Media Holdings announced yesterday via a press release in one of its papers that the media group will be hosting Stafford Masie at a tech breakfast meeting to be held in Harare on the 17th of February. Alpha is holding the event in partnership with Telkom owned ISP, iWayAfrica.

Today, we attended the Econet VoIP launch we wrote about yesterday. We speculated a lot yesterday about what exactly the product is so we’re quite excited to reveal the accurate details today. Those of you that follow us on Twitter received the news in real-time as we heard it in the morning so no new stuff here for them.

Just when everyone had agreed that Econet and the other GSM mobile operators are scared of VoIP, the largest telecommunications firm in Zimbabwe has come out to launch that very service. Tomorrow, Econet Wireless Zimbabwe will launch Econet VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) at an event to be held in Harare.

With less than two days left before the close of the year, we thought we’d post a listing of all the top stories we covered this year. This has been our busiest year since.

It’s usually extremely hard to get information from TelOne. No one there will speak on record. Especially about the ADSL service the country’s online fixed line operator launched early this year. So you can imagine our delight when we read a speech presented by the Post and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (POTRAZ) director general, Mr. Charles Sibanda recently at POTRAZ’s 10th birthday.

We promised to post the details of the winners of this year’s Zimbabwe ICT Achievers awards. Many of our readers have requested this information. So here they are. We got the details from the Zimbabwe Ministry of ICT and we’re posting all the information as is.

As you may know, the ICT Achievers Awards were held recently. We have posted a couple of stories about them here and will be posting more in the coming days. In the meantime, we have posted pictures of the event to our Facebook Page and we thought we would share that with you here.

The Zimbabwe ICT Achievers Awards ceremony was held tonight at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Harare. The annual awards are in their second year. Guest of honor at the event tonight was Zimbabwe Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirayi.

If you’re in Harare, you love theatre, and have an interest in the impact of the internet and social media on social and political issues, here’s something you’ll not want to miss: From 7 December (Yesterday) to 17 December 2011, a play called Fes’bhuku will be showing at Theatre in the Park in Harare. The term “Fes’bhuku” is a loan translation of “Facebook” into the Shona vernacular.

On Thursday last week IT professionals and Microsoft partners gathered at Rainbow Towers hotel to attend Microsoft’s first Open Door event in the country. The event was held by Microsoft to showcase their latest technologies especially those enabling companies locally to implement cloud computing.

A Southern Africa ICT for Education summit is set to be held in Zimbabwe in January 2012. The summit will be held under the patronage of the Zimbabwe Ministry of Education, Sport, Arts & Culture and it’s being facilitated by AfricaBrains. Other sponsors of the summit include Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, NEC, and MacMillan.

Microsoft will on 17 November 2011 (tomorrow) host the Microsoft Open Door 2011 event in Harare. The event will be held at Rainbow Towers hotel and will run from 9AM to 1:30 PM. The target audience for the event is academics, IT decision makers and IT managers.