Richard Champling...I couldnt hold back from commenting on your accusations that we may have ochestrated this deliberately. I head the Mocality team in Kenya...and we did not 'Ochestrate' this. Building a directory in Africa isnt as easy as just going around and knocking on doors. Our success was largely based on our ability to build and maintain a large agent network (15,000+ strong). These agents collect information that forms the bulk of our directory. However, for the agents...work isnt as simple as going around and knocking on doors. A lot of the population is still very suspicious about the internet and new technologies. People have fallen prey to scams for merely giving out their cell phone numbers...people are kidnapped etc.
Agents have the task of building trust with business owners in many cases just to extract their correct business details. Convincing them of the 'need' to be online, is not as easy as it seems. To facilitate this, the Mocality team in Kenya spends a lot of time travelling around, holding agent and business seminars and slowly turning our name and mission into something the local business person can trust. Therefore...when google launch a new product like KBO into the market, it is quite clear to us in the country, that they would have similar hurdles to climb when recruiting businesses. These hurdles are in some way a competitive advantage to us, as we've already spent tons of man hours going past them. Google would still need to build the trust...and the business owner would need to be comfortable working with them.
For Mocality, the businesses trust our agents and we use our agents to introduce products to them. Therefore, when google employees/agents call and say that we are working together, they are taking advantage of the relationship of trust we have worked so hard to build...in order to release their product easily into the market. How does this look for us? It's a domino effect... Our agents have no idea about the sites business owners call to ask them about, and their confusion makes the business owners suspicious about working with them further...the agents get upset with us for not informing them of new products or partnerships with google, as they are losing livelihoods...and we are left perplexed that a company of the stature like google is blatantly telling lies. Perhaps worse for us here are the allegations being made that we plan to charge Kshs 20,000 for some services...which is way more than an average business would be willing to spend. So...did we orchestrate this? we clearly did not. And as my CEO Stefan said in his blog...we have always been keen to form viable partnerships within Kenya, and google is a company we have looked at working with. So we dont understand why we werent asked about partnership possibilities if they really wanted to use our information. Really encouraged by the massive support we've seen online from so many people so far though. Very encouraging.