Like many great ideas, it began with frustration. Ari Kahn realised most of the many voicemails he was receiving every day were people leaving a message to say “call me”.
Kahn was the lead data consultant from 1994 to 2002 for MTN when this frustration inspired him to invent a system he named “Callme”.
The next day (November 16 2000; dates are important, as we shall see), Kahn called MTN’s lawyers with his idea for a patent. The day after that, Spoor & Fisher began working on a patent application, which was submitted on January 22 2001 to the patent office. Kahn was awarded the patent for “Method and System for Sending a Message to a Recipient” on the same day.
As lead data consultant at MTN, “I was practically the only individual in the MTN Corporation actively prosecuting patents and building an IPR [intellectual property rights] portfolio on their behalf”, Kahn told me.
“Callme was anything other than an ‘isolated innovation’ and happenstance. Nor was it just an ‘idea’, which network operators entertain 250 times a month,” said Kahn, who has 150 patents in 40 countries. “Callme was an integral part and progression in a series of technology firsts born in a pioneering wireless laboratory at MTN.”
On January 23, MTN launched its Callme service, a day after Kahn received the patent. “Within the first three days, over [1.5-million] Callme messages had been sent over the public MTN network,” says Kahn. “In the first month, Callme reached market saturation.”
Please Call Me was invented in Roodepoort — just like humanity was invented in Krugersdorp (Maropeng).
Meanwhile, in Midrand, breakthrough ideas have no IPR protections, only (then) bosses “willing to lie”, as the Constitutional Court found.
Five days after Kahn briefed lawyer “Chris de Villiers on the new invention”, a young trainee accountant at Vodacom sent his boss a memo about a “buzzing option”. Nkosana Kenneth Makate was referred to Philip Geissler, Vodacom’s director of product development and a board member at the time. It was Geissler’s verbal agreement with Makate for a share in the nascent service’s profits that this 22-year legal saga has been about – not who invented this utterly useful part of SA’s unique culture.
What happened next is the real reason Vodacom was forced to cough up about R700m to Makate this month.
In 2000, at the height of the feud between networks, Vodacom CEO Alan Knott-Craig plagiarised an idea of already dubious authenticity. He claimed he conceptualised it “by chance” while watching “one security guard trying to attract another’s attention, and because his buddy didn’t see him, the security guard called him on his cellphone”, his biographer, Eunice Afonso, wrote in Second is Nothing.
Three weeks after MTN’s launch, Vodacom released its copycat service.
This was 13 weeks since Kahn’s patent briefing with Spoor & Fisher. There’s an actual paper trail for Kahn’s invention and its commercial implementation. Kahn is the inventor of Please Call Me in every factual way — except the Constitutional Court gave Makate that title.
They did that because, in 2013, Vodacom refused to concede it had plagiarised its competitor’s ideas. By 2019, the Vodafone subsidiary’s then management admitted that “it had already been invented and subsequently patented by MTN. In fact, MTN launched its version, called Callme, the month before Vodacom did,” Nkateko Nyoka, then Vodacom’s chief officer for regulatory affairs, wrote.
Too little, too late.
If you look at this settlement from a corporate governance perspective, it looks like karmic retribution for such reckless and unethical behaviour.
The Constitutional Court even wrote in its 2019 judgment that Knott-Craig “was a poor, and in some respects plainly dishonest, witness” who was “willing to lie about matters which were documented in the records of Vodacom”.
It was not a situation where anyone covered themselves in glory, frankly.
During the main 2013 court case, Makate’s legal team presented the wrong MTN patent, while Makate tweeted a picture of this incorrect patent (which was filed in 1999), on which he wrote with an orange highlighter pen: “Vodacom is a liar.”
He added, “South Africans, this is why MTN failed to appear in court.”
MTN later let the patent lapse.
Missed call
It’s worth pointing out that Makate’s original “buzzing option” required the caller to make a missed call for the recipient to return. However, this wasn’t technically possible for pay-as-you-go users. Without airtime, you couldn’t make a call. But Kahn’s concept circumvented that by sending a free SMS, which the network then recouped (and then some) from the resultant phone call.
Kahn believes that “Vodacom came to Callme not because of what Makate had proposed” but “because its arch-rival across the road had just launched an SMS rocketship that landed on the moon”.
I have no beef with Mr Makate, but I believe in facts. I wish I wasn’t so compelled to defend them. “Always tell the truth, no matter what,” my mother (now 97) told us as kids. It’s always been my personal operating system’s primary instruction.
Factually, Mr Makate is the inventor of his “buzzing option”.
By the time Vodacom launched its copycat offering, MTN had done three weeks of free viral marketing for an idea whose time had truly come using technology (cellphones) that had also truly arrived. Vodacom even used the same marketing phrase, as well as fundamental methodology.
Philips may have pioneered electric illumination in Europe, but Thomas Edison holds the patent for the incandescent lightbulb. Ask Wikipedia, and guess who gets the credit?
Additionally, whose incandescent lightbulb was then used to literally light the way of the electric revolution and its resultant economic surge?
Similarly, do South Africans use Makate’s “buzzing option” or Kahn’s Callme?
Holding the patent is what defines someone as the inventor. A disputed labour agreement is not the same thing as a patent — nor, for that matter, is a Constitutional Court judgment. Always tell the truth, no matter what.
• Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za
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