I don’t understand how Google can put together a patent like GPay. The concept and system of buying cokes out of a vending machine has been around for 7 years, and the other payment stuff seems a lot like what local Telco’s in South Africa, like MTN, are and have been already offering for quite some time now. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the patent would infringe the rights of local South African companies such as Fundamo, who have been doing this for years. I just don’t think that this patent has any protectable interests.
Incidentally, Fundamo was recently funded by Mark Shuttleworth’s HBD Capital who are also investors in incuBeta. Local Cape Towner, Mark Shuttleworth sold his company, Thawte, to Verisign in 1999 for about $750m and founded HBD. I had a chance to catch up with Mark two weeks ago, while he was on a visit to Cape Town. We have a discussion around how important it is to understand the operating system, as a tech entrepreneur. Admittedly, the last time I worked on Linux was when I was using Mandrake – which is about 7 years ago, so I’m pretty hands off at the moment. Mark insisted that understanding the operating system was key – and obviously, as the founder of Ubuntu, he makes a strong argument.
I gave it a lot of thought, and I must say that I do disagree with Mark, simply because the paradigm has shifted. Tech entrepreneurs are using the Web Browser as the operating platform, not the OS. It’s critical to understand how the browser work, and what it’s capable within the browser – to me, software is becoming OS independent. As much as I respect Mark, I’m going to have to differ with him on this point – Synthasite is living proof of an application that is OS independent, but Browser dependent. As usual, time will tell…
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