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I’m very proud of the business that we’ve created here at Mocality, but I’m especially proud of two things:

1. Our crowdsourcing program. When we started this business, we knew that (unlike in the UK or US, where you can just kickstart your directory business with a DVD of business data bought from a commercial supplier), if we wanted a comprehensive database of Kenyan business, we would have to build it ourselves. We knew also that if we wanted to build the business quickly, we’d have to engage a lot of Kenyans to help us. So we built our crowd program that utilises M-PESA (Kenya’s ubiquitous Mobile Money system) to reward any Kenyan with a mobile phone who contributes entries to our database, once those entries have been validated by our team. Over two years, we’ve paid out Ksh. 11m (over $100,000) to thousands of individuals, and we have built Kenya’s most comprehensive directory, with over 170,000 verified listings. Personally, I regard the program as one of THE highlights of my 18 year career on the internet.
2. From day 1, we aimed to target all Kenyan businesses, irrespective of size. As a result, for about 2/3rds of our listed businesses, Mocality is their first step onto the web. That’s about 100,000 businesses that Mocality has brought online.

Please bear these two facts in mind as you read what follows.

Our database IS our business, and we protect and tend it very carefully. We spot and block automated attacks, amongst other measures. We regularly contact our business owners, to help them keep their records up-to-date, and they are welcome to contact our call centre team for help whenever they need it.

In September, Google launched Getting Kenyan Businesses Online (GKBO). Whilst we saw aspects of their program that were competitive, we welcomed the initiative, as Kenya still has enough growth in it that every new entrant helps the overall market. We are also confident enough in our product, our local team, and our deep local commitment that we believe we can hold our own against any competition, playing fair.

Shortly after that launch, we started receiving some odd calls. One or two business owners were clearly getting confused because they wanted help with their website, and we don’t currently offer websites, only a listing. Initially, we didn’t think much of it, but the confusing calls continued through November.

The Forensic analysis

What follows is necessarily a little technical. I’ve tried to make it as clear as I can, but two definitions may help the lay reader:

• IP Address – the numerical id by which computers identify themselves online.
• User-Agent - When a browser requests a page from a webserver, it tells the server what make, model, and version of browser it is, so that the webserver can serve content tailored to that browser’s capabilities. Webservers keep a log of both these details for every page requested, allowing us to do interesting detective work.

Conclusion

Since October, Google’s GKBO appears to have been systematically accessing Mocality’s database and attempting to sell their competing product to our business owners. They have been telling untruths about their relationship with us, and about our business practices, in order to do so. As of January 11th, nearly 30% of our database has apparently been contacted.

Furthermore, they now seem to have outsourced this operation from Kenya to India.

When we started this investigation, I thought that we’d catch a rogue call-centre employee, point out to Google that they were violating our Terms and conditions (sections 9.12 and 9.17, amongst others), someone would get a slap on the wrist, and life would continue.

I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on 2 continents.

Google is a key part of our business strategy. Mocality will succeed if our member businesses are discoverable by people via Google. We actually track how well our businesses place on Google as a key metric, and have always regarded it as a symbiotic relationship. We are in the business of creating local Kenyan content that Google can sell their adwords against. More than 50% of our non-direct traffic comes via Google (paid or organic). For us, the cost of going elsewhere is NOT zero.

Furthermore, we spend a very significant sum on advertising with Google Kenya. I wouldn’t be surprised if we are one of their largest local customers, between Mocality and our sister site Dealfish.co.ke.

Kenya has a comparatively well-educated but poor population and high levels of unemployment. Mocality designed our crowd sourcing program to provide an opportunity for large numbers of people to help themselves by helping us. By apparently systematically trawling our database, and then outsourcing that trawl to another continent, Google isn’t just scalping us, they’re also scalping every Kenyan who has participated in our program.

I moved to Africa from the UK 30 months ago to be CEO of Mocality. When I moved, Kenya’s reputation as a corrupt place to do business made me nervous. I’ve been very happily surprised- until this point, I’ve not done business with any company here that was not completely honestly conducted. It is important for global businesses to adapt to local cultural practice, but ethics are an invariant. As a admirer of Google’s usually bold ethical stance around the world, to find those principles are not applied in Kenya is simply… saddening.

Someone, somewhere, has some questions to answer.

These are my personal top 3:

• If Google wanted to work with our data, why didn’t they just ask?
  In discussions with various Google Kenya/Africa folks in the past, I’d raised the idea of working together more closely in Kenya. Getting Kenyan businesses online is precisely what we do.
• Who authorised this? Until we uncovered the ‘India by way of Mountain View’ angle, I could have believed that this was a local team that somehow forgot the corporate motto, but not now.
• Who knew, and who SHOULD have known, even if they didn’t know?