Last Week’s Tech Trends in Zambia: A Recap

02/02/2015 Sandi

ReFfresh-Button1 — Image Credit: Motion Mastery

Last week was pretty eventful so we’ve put together the tech stories you may have missed:

Samsung buying BlackBerry: The speculation has been high the past month that tech giant Samsung wants to buy out BlackBerry for about $7.5 billion. Our first thought was because of how secure BlackBerry devices are when it comes to storing information. It explains why many governments and security personnel use the BlackBerry brand more than any other. With Samsung’s growth a little slowed over the past few months as rivals such as Apple with its iPhone range take the lead. BlackBerry is also facing challenges with being a ‘cool’ brand so a buyout by Samsung may not be a bad idea. Read our thoughts here.

Facebook and Instagram might have been hacked: Even though Facebook has denied it was hacked, the hack group Lizard Squad claimed they did last week Tuesday morning, as users took to Twitter to complain about not being able to access the Facebook and Instagram accounts. Lizard Squad said they were responsible for the outage, but Facebook denied this and said the problem was technical. So much for trusting tech these days! The outage lasted about an hour, one of the longest periods Facebook has ever been down. Read the full story here.

Snapchat update loses ‘Best Friends: Snapchat added some new features including “Discover” which is a newsfeed searching feature that allows users stay up to date with all kinds of news. Among the news outlets on it are CNN, Daily Mail, MTV, etc. the other feature they got rid of is the “Best Friends” feature which allowed users see who their other contacts ‘snap’ with a lot. All kinds of memes were made about this removal, mostly stating that girlfriends would not be able to see who their man talks to most of the time. Pretty funny stuff. Read more here.

Twitter adds video and group chat messaging: After a long time coming Twitter finally has group chat and video sharing capabilities as of last week. The app was upgraded to include group chats that are private, won’t appears on a user’s timeline but are similar to DMs. You can even add users you don’t follow or who aren’t following you. The video sharing allows users to record and edit a 30 second video either within the Twitter app itself or to upload videos from their phone’s video gallery. The tech of apps just got more interactive. Read how it works here.

MTN gave away the last Hyundai: The Mobile wheels promotion came to an end, with the third car being given away to Mr Samuel Phiri last week. It was handed over by MTN CMO Clement Asante who said MTN was happy about giving back to their subscribers in such ways. We’re happy they did too. Read the full story here.

MTN also started giving back a 100%: On all data and airtime used as long as you subscribe for 50 ngwee per day. We reviewed their offer and had mixed feelings about it, especialy with the data rewards which can only be used between midnight and 6am, or that you can’t use the free bonus airtime on cross network calls and SMSes. Find out what other terms and conditions this 100% bonus promotion has here.