TOBY SHAPSHAK: Long walk until end of Vodacom Please Call Me saga
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 m...
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