Category Posts: ICT Companies

A reader, Tatenda Dzumira, sent us photos recently of Telecel Zimbabwe agents busy on the streets of Bulawayo touting from a loud speaker the availability of “dollar for 2” Telecel SIM cards. The SIM cards are sold from the back of a pickup truck and new subscribers can buy and register for mobile services right there in the streets. “…in Bulawayo they are evrywhere” noted Dzimura, referring to the agents.

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?

In October 2010, Africom made a bold unprecedented move in the history of the internet in Zimbabwe. Fresh from the launch of its new red brand and mobile broadband services, the company announced the pricing of its data packages; the cost of a 1 gigabyte bundle was US $18. It was crazy. It was fantastic for the customers. We celebrated. For the first time in Zimbabwe, here was a company that understood that the internet was not a luxury for rich.

Today we attended, the Telecel launch of its new brand. We list below the highlights of the speeches made by both John Swaim (new MD) and the marketing director, Obert Mandimika.

We’re just back from the Telecel launch of the new brand which we have posted about here before. Telecel provided quite some information, which we will post in a update today later, but in the meantime, here’s a press release prepared by the company announcing the new Telecel Zimbabwe brand.

Help us guess what company just started a teaser ad campaign in the local Zim print publications today. No prizes here.

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.

According to a press release posted on the Econet Wireless website today, the Federal High Court of Nigeria handed down judgment in favour of Econet in the dispute between the company and Bharti Airtel Nigeria. The matter stems from shareholding problems in 2003 and until now, Econet had failed to get any favorable outcome from the courts.

A year ago, US $50 per month unlimited broadband was only offered by one internet provider, the state owned PowerTel. Many would argue doesn’t really ‘need’ to make money. It wasn’t the best internet in town, largely because of congestion issues, but PowerTel afforded many small businesses and middle income earners an opportunity to have their own internet connection for the first time. The rest of the providers had prices north of $100 for any type broadband, forget unlimited.

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.

One of the interesting things presented at last week’s JumpStart event, was the rise in mobile penetration in Zimbabwe between 2006 and 2011. The actual significant rise started in 2009 but 2006 shows just how low it was just a little over 5 years ago, 848,000 subscribers.

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.

We’ve been receiving bits of information (and some reaction) to Telecel’s re-branding push that we wrote about 2 days ago. According to a reliable source, revelation of the new red colors and new logo were scheduled to happen on the 13th February. Yes, just before Valentine’s Day.

If you have been to the Telecel Zimbabwe Harare city branch in the past few days, you probably noticed the mobile operator is changing its colors. The new Telecel Zim, as you can see from the picture below, will be red. The outgoing is the blue logo on the right.