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Techzim@Techzim·16h

We have restocked the Samsung Galaxy A57! This is currently the most powerful phone outside the S-series succeeding the Galaxy A56. It comes in two flavours: • Samsung A57 5G (128GB, 8GB ) ...... $470 • Samsung A57 5G (256GB, 8GB ) ...... $500 As usual, 24 Month Samsung Warranty 🚚 Free delivery in Harare & Bulawayo | FedEx delivery countrywide 📲 Now available: wa.me/263714928326 Let's make smartphone buying in Zimbabwe risk-free!

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Techzim@Techzim·1d

WhatsApp alone now uses as much mobile internet data as ALL of Zimbabwe’s mobile internet used in 2022 Just 3 years ago That growth is crazy

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Techzim@Techzim·1d

There is also talk of an optional ad-free subscription plan for those who want to reclaim their peace of mind. For now, you can swipe past them in less than a second, but the era of monetised attention is here. How are you finding the ads so far? Is this useful discovery or just more digital noise?

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Techzim@Techzim·1d

Meta is positioning this as a "discovery" feature, but for many Zimbos, it is the end of the clean interface we have loved for years. While your private chats and calls remain end-to-end encrypted and completely ad-free, your Status feed now features sponsored posts clearly labeled between your friends' updates. 🧵

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Techzim@Techzim·1d

The "ad-free" sanctuary of WhatsApp has officially left the building. WhatsApp has been rolling out ads within Status updates and Promoted Channels, marking a massive shift in how we use the app. 🧵

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Techzim@Techzim·3d

A Zimbabwean AI researcher at University of Cape Town, Simbarashe Mawere, is part of a team who have developed a new specialised LLM called MzansiLM. The LLM was trained specifically on South Africa’s 11 official written languages including Zulu, Ndebele, Sepedi, Sotho, with strong performance in Zulu and Xhosa. Their goal is to solve the problem of popular LLMs like ChatGPT and Deepseek being quite poor at local African languages. MzansiLM is not a general-purpose chatbot though. It's a base model designed for developers and researchers to create applications such as text summarization, annotation, and local-language technology. The model was open sourced and is publicly available on Hugging Face to encourage further local-language tech development. You can access it yourself if you'd like to geek out!

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willard shoko@WillarShoko·1d

Just over a year ago (April) , the Starlink team visited Zimbabwe, and the outcomes of the discussion were to set up a Starlink Ground Station or PoP. The SpaceX team visited Zim again in June of last year, this time it was Ryan Goodnight, who played a significant role in bringing Starlink to Zimbabwe. Eswatini recently commissioned a Starlink Ground Station, and Rwanda is building a Ground Station as well. Zimbabwe has a larger market than the SADC combined and is the largest Starlink market in Africa, and will soon be larger than the UK combined. Both Eswatini and Rwanda have never been at capacity and have each less than 10% the number of subscribers that Zimbabwe has.

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Techzim@Techzim·1d

Telecel Zimbabwe needs a $50 million bailout. But any investor has to swallow a massive pill: $240 million in legacy debt. Back in the day, Telecel was it. Remember Mango. The creators of the "juice card", a term we still use today, like jusa airtime, jusa magetsi. Why does this matter? Because our telecom sector has become a two-horse race. A revived Telecel brings back real competition, pushing Econet and NetOne to offer better service. Will someone step in to brave that massive $240 mil debt? And if they do, what exactly are they buying? Won’t they have to deal with legacy issues from those original affirmative action guys, making this another exercise in kicking the can down the road? See less

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Techzim@Techzim·2d

A Kenyan court has ordered Safaricom to pay US $11 Million to a local developer whose idea they apparently stole. Peter Muoki built a mobile wallet concept for teenagers, letting parents monitor and control their children's spending via USSD. He pitched it to Safaricom in 2021. They said it was too complicated. Then a few months later, he saw them testing an almost identical product. The court believed him. It also ordered Safaricom to keep paying him 0.5% of M-Pesa revenue every year for as long as the product exists. Safaricom is appealing. This is not new in Africa. In South Africa, Vodacom employee Nkosana Makate invented the "Please Call Me" feature in 2001, which lets someone with no airtime send a free request for a callback. Vodacom stole the idea, built the product, and refused to pay him anything. The case went through courts for over 20 years and only settled out of court in November 2025. Reports estimate the settlement at between R350 million and R750 million.

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willard shoko@WillarShoko·3d

@Techzim ON another level, if you look at the number of Ecocash agents, Econet creates a lot of opportunities indirectly

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Techzim@Techzim·3d

@harveylb_ That is a ridiculous. More homes, and most likely more users per household, add in a vibrant commercial juggernaut and yet no new infrastructure. The question is, why aren’t places like these prioritized? Are there just too many of them to keep up with?

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harveylb@harveylb_·3d

Yes Econet carries more load per site. But "more" doesn't tell you where. One corridor. 750 homes → 3,900 in five years. Same 3 base stations serving all of it. Throw in Food Lovers on a Saturday and the maths stops working completely.

Techzim@Techzim

As we were saying, this doesn’t prove Econet is overloaded everywhere But when one network has far more users per data-capable site, and those users also generate far more traffic, it helps explain why some areas feel unusable at peak hours

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willard shoko@WillarShoko·3d

Still broken 5 months into the year, as I predicted Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education, Technology Innovation

Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education All links to Resources return a 404 Not Found Error SSL is also broken The Contact US page is also broken. @mhtestd I would like to submit my proposal to improve Tech in your ministry, but most online avenues are down, including the contact us page. Have done work in some of the institutions and they really need massive upgrades. One of the sites had a 100Mbps backbone capacity to all the divisions.

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Eng. Bhovungane@ny_emman·3d

Zimbabweans always excel in other countries where the environment is conducive. I hope Strive Masiyiwa can fund something similar and get some of our unemployed tech graduates off the informal sectors.

Techzim@Techzim

A Zimbabwean AI researcher at University of Cape Town, Simbarashe Mawere, is part of a team who have developed a new specialised LLM called MzansiLM. The LLM was trained specifically on South Africa’s 11 official written languages including Zulu, Ndebele, Sepedi, Sotho, with strong performance in Zulu and Xhosa. Their goal is to solve the problem of popular LLMs like ChatGPT and Deepseek being quite poor at local African languages. MzansiLM is not a general-purpose chatbot though. It's a base model designed for developers and researchers to create applications such as text summarization, annotation, and local-language technology. The model was open sourced and is publicly available on Hugging Face to encourage further local-language tech development. You can access it yourself if you'd like to geek out!

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Byte Zero@zerobyte0x00·3d

I'm glad someone finally picked this up! Epic work they doing

Techzim@Techzim

A Zimbabwean AI researcher at University of Cape Town, Simbarashe Mawere, is part of a team who have developed a new specialised LLM called MzansiLM. The LLM was trained specifically on South Africa’s 11 official written languages including Zulu, Ndebele, Sepedi, Sotho, with strong performance in Zulu and Xhosa. Their goal is to solve the problem of popular LLMs like ChatGPT and Deepseek being quite poor at local African languages. MzansiLM is not a general-purpose chatbot though. It's a base model designed for developers and researchers to create applications such as text summarization, annotation, and local-language technology. The model was open sourced and is publicly available on Hugging Face to encourage further local-language tech development. You can access it yourself if you'd like to geek out!

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Techzim@Techzim·3d

@BloggoJones Choices are there, but WhatsApp network effects are very strong.

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Bloggo Jones@BloggoJones·3d

@Techzim Well iMessage works and androids platform also works just a lot of people have it off and they are cross platform now. Then there’s telegram, signal, viber and even this econet social app. It’s not like we don’t have choices tbh

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Techzim@Techzim·3d

WhatsApp has started rolling out its paid subscription service, called WhatsApp Plus, in some countries. 1/4

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Techzim@Techzim·3d

@BloggoJones mms isn't quite universal yet. not because of the tech, but mostly operators. Econet's is off currently

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Bloggo Jones@BloggoJones·3d

@Techzim Doing this after being free for almost 15 years is something. People really can switch now because MMS is working and there are plenty of other free apps. This is how WhatsApp declines

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Techzim@Techzim·3d

If WhatsApp Plus is rolled out in Zimbabwe, will you buy a subscription? 4/4

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Techzim@Techzim·3d

They are using the same playbook mobile operators have used for decades - stuff like Buddie Beats ring tones that Econet has here in Zimbabwe. 3/4

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