The real inventor of Please Call Me in South Africa – MyBroadband
Cellular technology innovator Ari Kahn is the real inventor of the Please Call Me service, which he developed while working as a contractor for MTN nearly 24 years ago.
Kahn initially studied medicine at the University of Cape Town, but after two and a half years, he left to pursue a computer science degree at Wits University.
Kahn believes his true gift was in programming. At one point, he could code in 11 or 12 languages.
“My major project at Wits was done in APL but had to be given to IBM because the professors couldn’t read the language,” he told TechCentral in an interview in 2019.
After completing his undergraduate studies, he progressed about three-quarters into his honours degree before getting the opportunity to work at Anglo American in geophysical remote sensing.
After a “year or two” at the company, he joined the South African Air Force.
During his two years in the Air Force, he was seconded to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), where he worked for the CSIR’s Aeronautics Institute.
A few years later, he attended an expo in Johannesburg in 1994, where he met MTN’s first CEO John Beck.
Kahn started working on contract at MTN in 1994, the year of its founding, and served as lead data consultant until June 2002.
He said his sole mandate was to develop innovative products and services and that he was given “carte blanche” access to various divisions at the company.
“I could walk into operations, billing, sales, marketing. I had free access to all C-level executives up to the chairman,” he said.
“I really had a dream job at MTN, and it was a phenomenal time, as cellular was very new in South Africa.”
One of his first major milestones at MTN was helping develop www.mtnsms.com, once the most visited website in Africa.
The portal allowed users to send a short message to a cellphone through the web and formed part of MTN’s Internet strategy at a time when cellular Internet was in its infancy in South Africa.
In the first 12 months, the service had amassed 7.5 million users, who had sent over a billion SMSs between them.
Kahn said the idea for Please Call Me came from the frustration of going through his voicemail and being greeted with numerous messages requesting that he call people.
He conceived the USSD-based “Call Me” service on 15 November 2000.
This was a week before Kenneth Nkosana Makate, often wrongly credited as the inventor of Please Call Me, pitched his idea for a “Buzz” service to Vodacom.
Kahn briefed MTN’s patent attorneys with the details of how the service would work on 16 November 2000, and MTN successfully filed for IP protection on Call Me on 22 January 2001.
MTN launched the service on 23 January 2001, seven weeks before Vodacom would roll out a clone offering, which was later renamed “Please Call Me”.
In its ongoing court battle with Makate, Vodacom has acknowledged that MTN was the first to patent and launch the service, making it the inventor.
While MTN has allowed the patent to expire, Kahn has estimated the service generated tens of billions of rand through voice call revenue from returned calls.
A new zero-credit missed call system
After leaving MTN in 2002, Khan developed an advanced cloud-based telephony switch that allows people to ring numbers without any airtime or credit on their telephone or cellular accounts.
The ZRO system was eventually launched under Kahn’s San Francisco-based startup StarLogik, which he founded in 2011.
ZRO uses the universal “*” key on telephones and cellphones to initiate and terminate a missed call by routing it through a cloud server linked with a carrier’s network.
Ironically, the ZRO system does exactly what Makate originally proposed his “Buzz” idea should do — make missed calls without any airtime.
However, it could not be implemented within the constraints of the standard carrier network systems and required creating a separate Internet service to place the missed calls.
The ZRO system won the GSMA Global Mobile Award for Best Emerging Market Technology.
Cell C has started testing the system in South Africa, allowing its subscribers with minimal or no money on their airtime balance to send a missed call.
To use it, Cell C customers can enter the “*” key followed by the number of their recipient.
The service has been used by over 200 million users worldwide, who have placed these zero-fee missed calls over 90 billion times.
Kahn’s advice to young innovators is to pay attention to everyday things that frustrate them and consider and develop the solutions to solving them from there.