Category Posts: ICT Companies

Econet Wireless Zimbabwe, the country’s largest telecoms firm, announced today its full year financial results for the period ended February 2012. An update posted by Bloomberg the company’s annual profit after tax has risen 18% from US $140.9m last year to $165.7 million this year.

Here’s a summary of other announcements made at the briefing today:

Is it that Africa is not commercially active on the internet and therefore doesn’t matter much in the ad revenue scheme of things? Or are African populations too fragmented to approach efficiently as a market? Is Zuckerberg missing an entire continent of more than 1 billion people whose access to the internet is clearly on a sharp rise?

When Zimbabwe’s largest telecoms firm launched VoIP services back in January, they launched with a broken website. Broken in that most links were not working and the “Contact Us” page contained the contact information of the company that (apparently) supplied Econet the VoIP system, SysMaster. In short, Econet had forgotten to update the pages with their company information. We posted about it a week after the launch because product launches are sometimes so hectic you don’t always get everything right immediately.

After my last interview with a big mining firm, I got fed up. I had gone to many interviews with big companies, and the result was always the same. With unemployment at a staggering 80% , one can imagine the stiffness of the competition , now add corruption and your chances are next to none.

For website development and web companies that rely on heavy internet usage (to push ads), Africa has presents a unique problem and opportunity because of its minimal local content online. For web developers, it’s been how to convince and be trusted by small businesses that having some web presence will deliver and make a difference to their bottom line. It’s not easy to do this especially as the SMEs have to part with some dollars.

In February, an organisation called Africa Exchange (more about the organisation here) hosted an ICT “Meeting of the Minds” event in Harare where presentations and discussion by Zim’s ICT industry leaders and government officials focused on strategies to develop Zimbabwe’s ICT sector. Part of the objective of the event was to come up with ICT Month, basically a month set aside to raise awareness and launch programmer promoting economic growth of the ICT sector. Well, the plan for the ICT Month was formulated and May 2012 will see some programmes launched.

South Africa’s Rob Sussman and Lance Fanaroff introduced (officially) in December of 2011 a cost-free money transfer system that allows anyone on Facebook to transfer money to anyone else on Facebook. The two founders have taken the concept to Facebook’s Palo Alto offices and to prominent banks and financial institutions where they have received the nod of approval.

Some five months ago, in November, Webdev, the company behind Zimbabwe’s successful online classifieds site, launched a social network and named it SHA. They were not the first to try social networking locally; there have been many ‘local’ social networks already. All of them open source projects like JomSocial, SHAretronix, BuddyPress, elgg themed for the local audience. SHA’s not much different in that respect, but unlike other such projects, SHA’s is owned by an internet company that already has heavy visibility and multiple platforms to showcase its products in Zimbabwe’s internet space.

An update sent out by one of Zimbabwe’s largest internet service providers, ZOL, confirms (what the industry has been saying for about a month now) that Aquiva Wireless and Aptics are having major issues delivering internet via the WiMAX platform. The ZOL update was sent out some 6 days ago and read in part:

These are the words that the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe said at the launch of the National e-Learning Programme at Chogugudza Primary school in Goromonzi. The Herald, a local government owned daily newspaper, reports today that the new computerization of schools programme will see about 100 schools, both primary and secondary, receiving e-learning tools (computers and education software) under a pilot project.

Commenting on the presentation made by ForgetmeNot Africa founder and Director of Technology yesterday, the QnA and the discussion that followed, a tech entreprenur at the event described it as “an eye opener”. It indeed was. And this is why we’re sharing the presentation with you here.

In the previous article we focused on the six prominent areas of Fraud and revenue Assurance in telecoms. You will agree with me that these are just areas which will start making sense if we combine people, technology and processes onto them. The lifeblood and heart of any organization are the processes (how an organization differentiates itself). In this article we will discuss processes in depth.

The MAPA project, an initiative to “make African conservation more accessible and visible”, will be holing a Google Geo Tools training workshop in Harare in May. The purpose of the workshop is to help conservation practitioners in Zimbabwe understand and use Google mapping tools like Google Earth, Maps and Fusion Tables to visualize and share their work online.

Jason Njoku’s one and a half year old outfit has raised the bar for Sub Saharan African startups. Iroko Partners is charging ahead with its vision to put Nigerian entertainment online. Pando Daily published a post yesterday, revealing that the Lagos based startup had bolstered its war chest by way of two $4 million rounds. The funding came from Silicon Valley and emerging market stalwarts, Tiger Global.

Microsoft held it’s much awaited Developer Day two days ago on at the Harare International Conference Centre. It was quite impressive how they catered for techies and non-techies who seemed to be the majority of the attendants. One of the strongest remarks made in the early moments of the event was “In Africa, the challenges we are facing are our biggest advantages”.