Mukela comes out tops

BUSINESS

By Alfonce Mbizwo, Harare, Zimbabwe

Mukela Travel has won Zimbabwe’s first ever Start-Up Challenge at the finals held at the Crowne Plaza Monomotapa Hotel in Harare on Thursday, beating four other contestants.

The company won a total of USD10 000 worth of prizes - USD5 000 in cash and USD5 000 in internet services from the lead sponsor, Zimbabwe Online (ZOL)

Mukela Travel developed an online reservation site connecting local and international tourists to accommodation options founders and last month told Biztechafrica that they plan to connect Zimbabwe’s hotel industry online to increase its international visibility citing the disparity between the information on the tourism industry in the country and the information that the market has.

The two runners-up were Sadomba-Mahari, a software development firm that developed AvisPar Visual Package developed a 3D computer graphics animations application for advertising media production and film-making application and Softwarehouse.

The latter’s new Hardware Inventory is a Windows-based hardware and bandwidth monitoring tool designed to give comprehensive information concerning bandwidth usage, serial numbers of every single hardware component on computers and networks.

This allows users to diagnose network problems and also to find out why a client is doing more traffic than its peers. The application is in final testing at a local school.

The two received USD2 500 in cash and USD2 500 in internet services each.

The other finalists were Ribe Networks and Funza.