If Kenneth Nkosana Makate invented the Please Call Me service where is his patent? Or even his patent application?
The only patent application was submitted by former MTN lead data consultant Ari Kahn and filed with the Patent Office by Spoor & Fisher on 22 January 2001. His patent was awarded the same day. Kahn told me she briefed MTN’s legal representatives on 16 November 2000, having conceived of the idea the day before.
While Makate was a trainee accountant at Vodacom, Kahn was lead data consultant at MTN from 1994 to 2002 – where he worked on a range of cutting-edge ideas for the then-nascent mobile industry. He was a key figure in many other developments, including a website that allowed anyone to send free SMSes to mobile numbers.
This week the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) ordered Vodacom to pay Makate between R29-billion and R55-billion – which is significantly higher than what the Constitutional Court previously ordered in the long-running Please Call Me (PCM) saga. The apex court stipulated that Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub had the final say in what Makate should be paid and offered R47-million.
Makate “is entitled to be paid 5% – 7.5% of the total revenue of the PCM product from March 2001 to date of judgment …. together with the more interest thereon,” the judgement reads.
Please Call Me, maybe?
Kahn came up with the idea, he told me in an email in 2019, that he was dealing with his own frustrations at the time. He said he was getting as many as 40 voicemails a day, mostly from people who left him a message to “call me”.
Kahn is a legendary figure in the mobile industry in South Africa. He worked on “three world firsts,” he told me. “Callme” as he first named it was the third of these and he had the idea on 15 November 2000.
The dates are important here. Kahn patented it – through MTN’s lawyers Spoor and Fisher on 22 January 2001 – as a “method and system for sending a message to a recipient”.
The next day the service was launched, about which Kahn jokes that he “injects Callme virus into MTN”. Two days later, on January 25, “Callme Skyrockets to 1.5m messages”.
It was a runaway success and is now as essential a part of the South African cellular landscape – which allowed someone to send free SMSes (which back then cost R0.25) and for the receiver to then make a call.
“In the first month, Callme reached market saturation,” Kahn told me. “Growing at an astronomical rate of ‘hundreds of thousands of new users a day’, Callme was the fastest service adoption ever recorded in the history of Telecoms and Internet, then and to this day.”
Kahn thinks the idea was leaked from when he briefed MTN’s legal representatives on 16 November 2000. Five days later, on 21 November 2000, Makate sent his “buzzing option” memo to Lazarus Muchenje, according to Vodacom’s own records.
Kahn and MTN were granted his patent by the Patent Office on 22 January 2001 and the MTN sent its first Please Call Me text the next day, on 23 January 2001.
Three weeks later, on 9 February 2001, Vodacom announced its launch of the “Call Me” service, which is described as a “world first” and credited Makate with the idea, according to Vodacom. It only sent the first message the next day, on 10 February 2001.
That is thirteen weeks after Kahn briefed Spoor and Fisher, and three weeks after the patent was granted and MTN sent its first Please Call Me SMS. That clearly does not qualify as a “world first”.
Vodacom said it “notes” the SCA’s 6 February judgment. “Vodacom is surprised and disappointed with the judgment and will bring an application for leave to appeal before the Constitutional Court of South Africa within the prescribed period,” a spokesperson said.