ZOL continues to be an innovative and pioneering ISP. Check out this letter they sent to their clients this week:

Here is a quick tip from ZOL that can save you up to 90% on your phone bill and get cheap Intenational phone calls and SMS messages. You can even get a UK or USA landline number that rings on your computer in Zimbabwe! And to make it really easy to top up your Skype account, ZOL is now selling $5 and $10 Skype recharge cards.

If you haven’t heard of Skype (www.skype.com) you are about to enter a new world! If you have, then are you aware of all the features including cheap calls to phones worldwide, cheap SMS, foreign landline numbers ringing in Zimbabwe and the ablity to set your caller ID to your cell number? To get the best from Skype you need a Broadband connection. However, Skype does work over a good quality dialup connection.

Skype is a global communications company, bought by eBay in 2005 for US$2.5 billion, that uses highly advanced encryption and compression technology to route voice and text communications over a global peer-to-peer network to effectively reduce the cost of phone calls to zero in many cases.

Skype-to-Skype calls and text are always FREE. However to make outbound calls to regular phones costs a fraction of the price of existing providers. More importantly ZOL has convinced a company in the US to sell Skype recharge cards in Zimbabwe. Topping up Skype has always been difficult for Zimbabweans - but this has changed! It’s now as easy as topping up your cell phone. Just buy a recharge card at one of our offices or payment points. (more…)

The various statutes that make up the law of Zimbabwe are public documents. So are judgements from the country’s High Courts and the Supreme Court. The challenge though, has always been access to these documents, until now. A new online initiative now makes all of these documents freely available.

Through a new website, www.law.co.zw, researchers, law students, lawyers and Human Rights activists can now access the legal information they need, at no cost.

The website also features a legal resources directory which lists various lawyers and legal service providers in the country.

The site has been going through a testing phase for its first month of operation and is now open to the public. “There are still other areas of content to be filled in,” said a spokes person for the project managers, “it’s an ongoing project, as new court cases come up, we will add them. We also plan to increase the scope of the site to archiving newspaper articles that cover legal issues.”

_______
Disclosure: ZiReport and Law.co.zw are both owned by Aripano Infinity.

Oscar Manduku

Zimbabwean entrepreneur, Oscar Manduku has written a book aimed at helping companies make the best use of the Internet. Here’s an exerpt.

Effective Communication for Sales
In these times of challenging economic conditions, businesses are being forced to find alternative means of communicating with stakeholders, especially customers. On the other hand, the subjects of Internet and websites are no longer painful ones as they were a few years ago. The distance between the consumer and the company is now being made shorter through websites, as more businesses in Zimbabwe are launching their businesses, products, and services on the “.CO.ZW” cyber landscape. (more…)

A look at the state of company websites in Zimbabwe

Chances are you print a new company brochure and/or new business cards every year or every time you change certain details about your services or products or whenever you move office.

It’s rather tacky each time you pull out a card to be searching frantically for a pen and then cancelling out things and scribbling your new details in tiny little spaces remaining on the card- so it’s a great idea to print new cards every now and then, yes? (more…)