Category Posts: Web

FinditFast.co.zw is one of the more visible business directory websites in Zimbabwe. More visible as compared to the hundreds of business directory and classifieds sites in the country that is. In terms of content, they have a site that’s much more populated than your typical overnight open source installation. In fact the directory is so populated the content looks like it was imported from another service. But that’s not the point of this article; it’s their events that impressed us. FinditFast arguably has the best online event listings in the country.

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?

A report carried in the Chronicle, a Zimbabwean daily newspaper, says that many Zimbabweans have fallen victim to internet fraudsters. Without revealing any figures, a Criminal Investigation Department (CID) spokesperson Detective Inspector Augustine Zimbili indicated that cases of Zimbabweans falling prey to fraudsters were on the increase.

Zimbabwe’s most trafficked entertainment and lifestyle news website, Zimbo Jam, is finally back. The site went down on 13 April as the team there upgraded it to a new version. During the upgrade however, things didn’t go as planned; a major component failed, derailing the whole upgrade process.

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.

Zimbabwe Online (ZOL), the ISP that has the largest number of Wi-Fi hotspots in Zimbabwe, has slashed the prices of its Wi-Fi internet service. The service has effectively become one of the lowest priced internet packages in the country. But the slash is coming with some not so good news; ZOL is killing the 15 minutes free trial it offered customers on its ZOLspots (ZOL hotspots).

Zimbo Jam, Zimbabwe’s most popular entertainment news and culture website is down. The site has been down since Friday due to a problem that happened during an upgrade to a new version of the website. We got in touch with Zimbo Jam founder Fungai Tichawangana today and he told us that one of the major components of the site stopped working on Friday last week and his team had to spend two days restoring it. “Totally derailed us- as so many other things depended on it,” he said.

Zimbabwe has over the years become a predominantly cash society while mobile communication continues to grow and be pivotal to most consumers in the informal sector. We recognise the inherent burdens airtime pre-payment inflicts on consumers.

We established this morning that the website belonging to the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair Company, www.zitf.net was hacked. The Zimbabwean company runs the one of the largest multi-sectoral exhibitions in sub-Saharan Africa and is currently preparing for the 2012 annual exhibition to take place in less than 2 weeks.

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.

It was just a few months ago, sitting with the CEO who had moved back into the country after working as a successful starter-up in the US. The interview part hadn’t started and I was shaking a bit (he had come to pick me up in a classy vehicle and drove me to his classy house so yes I’m not used to being so..I don’t know). He was narrating his experiences in the States and how you could earn big from the silliest of apps or nothing from a huge idea. Then he leaned forward, reached in his pocket and brought out a monochrome phone and said “If you want to be big in Africa, you can’t go wrong with mobile. This is the only way. The regular guy knows SMS…[bla bla bla]“. I nodded and shook (50-50). He was definitely not the first to tell me this, and wasn’t the last but I wasn’t and still am not convinced.

You can easily set up a broadband Internet connection on your PC/Laptop in the comfort of your home or while traveling without necessarily paying the price of a new Internet dongle. You might have all that you need in your home, except for one item that will only cost you US $5!

We received a tip from a reader in the morning today advising us that the Daily News website (www.dailynews.co.zw) was down. So we did the usual checks and indeed it was down. A content delivery network service – used on the site – called CloudFlare was reporting that the site was offline.

Less than a month ago, Econet announced that it had connected a million subscribers on its mobile money platform, Ecocash. Yesterday, a Twitter update by the CEO of Pattern Matched, Markus Schorn, revealed that Econet has since signed on an additional 200,000 subscribers to the mobile money service since the March

The internet traffic local news websites has never really been measured and talked about in a standard way. The website owners typically just communicate their own traffic stats when they reach a milestone or break a record or just for the sake of selling advertising and these stats are never verified by a third party.