{"id":24929,"date":"2016-04-27T02:51:36","date_gmt":"2016-04-27T02:51:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/south-african-inventor-wins-vodacom-please-call\/"},"modified":"2016-04-27T02:51:29","modified_gmt":"2016-04-27T02:51:29","slug":"south-african-inventor-wins-vodacom-please-call","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/south-african-inventor-wins-vodacom-please-call\/","title":{"rendered":"South African inventor wins Vodacom &#8216;Please Call Me&#8217; battle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>{A South African man has won his legal bid to force leading mobile phone firm Vodacom to pay him for inventing a popular messaging service.}<\/p>\n<p>The country&#8217;s highest court ordered the firm to compensate ex-employee Nkosana Makate for the Please Call Me service.<\/p>\n<p>He waged a nine-year court battle, accusing Vodacom of breaching an agreement to pay him.<\/p>\n<p>Please Call Me was introduced in 2001, allowing prepaid phone users to send a free text asking to be phoned back.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I have no hard feelings towards Vodacom. I love the company. I worked for it since I was 18-years-old\u201a&#8221; a visibly elated Mr Makate said after the judgment, South Africa&#8217;s Times Live news site reports.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve been on this road for 16 years\u201a nine years now in trial\u201a after three dismissals by the lower courts. It&#8217;s been a long journey for me\u201a&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n<p>The Constitutional Court overturned a ruling of a lower court, which said that while Please Call Me was Mr Makate&#8217;s idea he could not claim payment as he only had an oral agreement with Vodacom&#8217;s director of product development, Philip Geissler, who lacked the authority to make a deal on behalf of the firm.<\/p>\n<p>Mr Makate has previously told local media that the invention had generated about 70bn rand ($5bn; \u00a33bn) for Vodacom and he wanted a 15% cut of that.<\/p>\n<p>A lawyer for Vodacom was quoted by local media as saying they were studying the judgement.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"spip-document spip-document-11965 aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/jpg\/_89449692_mobile.jpg\" alt=\"Nkosana Makate has said he believes his invention has generated $5bn (\u00a33bn) for Vodacom\" \/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>{A South African man has won his legal bid to force leading mobile phone firm Vodacom to pay him for inventing a popular messaging service.} The country&#8217;s highest court ordered the firm to compensate ex-employee Nkosana Makate for the Please Call Me service. He waged a nine-year court battle, accusing Vodacom of breaching an agreement [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[100],"byline":[249],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-24929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-africa","byline-bbc"],"bylines":[{"id":249,"name":"BBC","slug":"bbc","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":104}],"contributors":[{"id":249,"name":"BBC","slug":"bbc","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":104}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24929"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=24929"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=24929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}