Category Posts: Miscellaneous

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.

Recently we held an interview with Lovemore Mukono, the co-founder and CEO of Mukonitronics. Mukonitronics is one of Africa’s leading power technology companies in terms of design and manufacturing industrial power electronic products for the local and export market. The range of Mukonitronics products include power electronics for mining, power generation and transmission, electricity distribution, telecommunications, railway and industrial automation.

So, how do you currently call for a cab in Harare when you need one? Give the cab driver a call? An SMS? Does it cost you airtime every time to do this? Do you always get a response on time? If you have a smartphone, (or just a regular internet connection at a desktop) there’s a new service in town you might want to give a try. It’s called Tweet-A-Cab.

Back in march when news first broke that ZimSwitch was working with Telecel to power mobile banking for local banks, the two banks that Telecel confirmed they were working with were CABS and POSB. CABS launched its mobile banking service (branded textacash) in September. As for POSB, ZimSwitch told us exactly month ago the bank was in “live pilot”.

Through adverts in the press today, POSB has announced that its mobile banking service is available to the public.

Last week, we received a press release on the winning of a Global Telecoms Business award by Norman Moyo, an exec at Tanzanian mobile operator called Zantel. We posted the story here. Moyo has worked for Celtel in Zambian and Nigeria, Econet Wireless in Zimbabwe and Zain in Bahrain. He was recognised as one of the top 40 global executives under the age of 40 in the telecoms industry.

For the article, we asked Moyo what he is investing in back home. His response was something we found quite interesting. Here’s an extract:

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are now considered the cornerstone of every economy, transforming the way business is done while significantly impacting governments and communities. ICTs have contributed to the rapid development and reformation of economies while enhancing productivity and remodelling the flow of capital.

Following our story earlier today on the coming launch of ZimSwitch Mobile later this month, a reader sent us a picture they took of a mobile banking advert by CABS in their Sam Levy’s Village branch in Borrowdale, Harare.

The need to have local Zimbabwean content on the internet has been widely discussed. The main idea being that the internet will become more relevant to locals if it has content people have traditionally consumed on platforms like TV, radio, newspapers, books and so forth.

FBC Bank has begun offering a MasterCard Prepaid service that enables locals to shop online across various platforms worldwide. In a campaign dubbed ‘Load & Go’ the bank initially introduced the campaign through the endorsement of local music icon; Oliver Mtukudzi, advertising the service’s access to leading merchants around the world.

We spent the better part of today at the Startup Challenge interacting with tech startups and watching them demo. It was an exciting day, filled with a lot of great ideas presented by some of the most interesting Zimbabweans in tech. It’s not easy to explain how it feels to be amoung such amazing people and watch them passionately talk about their startups.

As Techzim we are obliged to promote debate and dialogue. We were surprised to read an article in this morning’s Daily News (A Zimbabwe daily) that we believe was not generous with facts. The article’s opening shot begins by describing Trustco as “a company that appears to talk very big about itself”, and proceeds to stage a series of assaults on the company, most of it factually incorrect and misleading.

We too saw last week’s story on spiritual recharge cards by a Zim church leader, Emmanuel Makandiwa. We too found the story somewhat confusing and were eager to find out more so we could write a short ‘explanation’ of how it works, technically. Yes, just the technical side of things; it’s not our place to try to understand and explain the spiritual side.

Techzim has just found out that Western Union has been offering a domestic money transfer service since the 16th of May 2011. It appears as if not enough PR work was done in this regard as even an online search did not yield any information. The money transfer service enables locals to send and receive money within Zimbabwe without the need of a bank account. A receiver is able to access money within minutes of sending and is subject to agent locations. Western Union’s local agents are Microking (a subsidiary of Kingdom Bank), Easy Link, POSB, and FFS.

This post is part of the report back for Techzim’s tour to Chisumbanje and Middle Sabi, where Green Fuel is setting up a large scale Ethanol production . We managed to sit down for an interview (over lunch) with Graeme Smith who is the company’s GM. Finding another time would have been disastrous due to his busy schedule and the needle eye timeframe of our tour.

Having woken up at 3am to make the trip to Chisumbanje and Middle Sabi, we arrived at about 10am courtesy of our host- Lilian Muungani (Green Fuel’s communications manager) who led the way in her bakkie. After snaking through numerous twists and turns (including ‘crossing’ the historic Birchenough Bridge) we eventually descended on an endless carpet of Sugarcane. This was the perfect arrival, much like reaching an oasis in a desert as this part of Zimbabwe’s lowveld is semi-arid.