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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.”

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

As it will not be feasible to convene the annual CSZ Summer School this year, the Chapter is holding a one day workshop in Harare for the benefit of CSZ and COMSA members and other interested parties. It will include a presentation on the proposed ICT Bill due to go before parliament in the near future and which will affect all working in the ICT industry. Read the rest of this entry »

TIME: If you’re reading this in Africa, you’re one of a few who can. With just 50 million Web users across the continent, as few as 5% of Africans access the Internet, a percentage far lower than in Asia, Europe or the Americas. In only a handful of African countries do more than 1% of the population use broadband services. (Among OECD countries, broadband penetration averages 18%.) And the services that exist don’t come cheap. Broadband costs more in sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world: consumers in the region spent an average of $366 each month for speedier Internet access in 2006, according to the World Bank. Users in India, meanwhile, paid just $44. Read the rest of this entry »

By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA - The blogger calls himself a “fat white man” and jokes about the right way to approach a cordon of Zimbabwean riot police: Don’t wear an opposition T-shirt, or ask for the results of the recent one-man presidential runoff. Instead, greet them with a breezy “Good morning! How are you, sirs?” Read the rest of this entry »

By Sydney Kawadza and Victoria Ruzvidzo (The Herald)

The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, police and the Anti-Corruption Commission have launched a joint blitz on illegal foreign currency dealers abusing the e-banking system at Internet cafes.

At least 20 dealers who have been netted in the crackdown are expected to appear in court soon. Read the rest of this entry »

The Public Interest Registry (PIR), the registering that manages the .org highest rank level domain, have announced that there are now 7 million .org domain names registered worldwide.

Driven by trends such as friendly networking, issue awareness, online political organizing, and community sites the .org top level domain is now the third largest generic domain (after .com and .net). Alexa Raad, CEO, PIR, commented: “This is a significant milestone for .ORG, considered in the state of it has consistently grown 20% percent year over year since its management by Public Interest Registry”. Read the rest of this entry »

As the blogging phenomenon rips across the global web, a Zimbabwean online media group has set up a new blog that is set to add a whole new dimension to blogging in Zimbabwe.

The blog- www.zimbablog.com, will bring together thousands of Zimbabwean bloggers around the world and enable them to share their experiences, opinions and ideas on a single platform. Read the rest of this entry »