Long walk to free calls

The Vodacom Please Call Me saga is not resolved but at least its inventor, Ari Kahn, has finally been acknowledged

Who really invented the Please Call Me service? It’s the key question in the free messaging service saga that reached a crescendo last week with threats, accusations and demonstrations outside Vodacom World.

The answer, now common cause, is Ari Kahn, MTN’S former lead data consultant. “Call Me” as he first named it, was an idea he had on November 15 2000, he told me last week. He briefed MTN’S lawyers, Spoor & Fisher, the next day and, remarkably, had a working prototype a day later. Kahn had some experience, having built the runaway success that was Mtnsms.com, a website that let people send free SMSES. Spoor & Fisher submitted his patent on January 22 2001 as a “method and system for sending a message to a recipient”.

The next day the service was launched. The results were so spectacular that at first Kahn thought it was a technical error. “Within the first three days over 1.5-million Call Me messages had been sent over the public MTN network. In the first month, Call Me reached market saturation.”

Meanwhile, Nkosana Makate was a trainee accountant at Vodacom who says he came up with the idea to stay in contact with his then girlfriend, now wife, because he didn’t know whether she wasn’t calling him back because she wasn’t interested in him or just didn’t have airtime.

Makate took his former employers to court, where he lost two cases, before the Constitutional Court ruled in his favour in 2016.

Last month he was reportedly offered R49m by Vodacom.

Vodacom’s chief officer for corporate affairs, Takalani Netshitenzhe, admitted in a full-page advertisement in the Mail & Guardian that “Ari Kahn, who consulted for MTN, created the ‘Call Me’ technology in 2000 and the SA Patent Office granted the Call Me patent to Kahn and MTN”.

The advert added: “The initial plan to charge for the service was abandoned by the company. It is also noteworthy to mention that Please Call Me was launched in the month after MTN launched its version, called Call Me.”

So why didn’t Vodacom save itself the hassle and admit back then it was MTN’S idea? It’s hard to tell, but there were big egos in the nascent cellular industry and fierce competition between MTN and Vodacom.

Even though the lower courts found for Vodacom, its legal mistake was not presenting the evidence that might have exonerated it or proved in patent law what’s called “prior art”.

Makate tweeted last week that he has taken the offer on judicial review. He disputes Vodacom’s offer and Kahn’s version of what happened. He also questions why MTN didn’t uphold its patent application. (On this point, MTN said last week it was more interested in building the cellular industry.)

This drama, it seems, isn’t over. What is indisputable is that Please Call Me was a runaway success.

Vodacom’s legal mistake was in not presenting the evidence to prove ‘prior art’ in patent law