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tl;dr (kinda skimmed, correct me if I'm wrong) Mocality is a Kenyan business that gathers and aggregates information about the businesses in Kenya to improve t
by cpdean 15y ago
tl;dr (kinda skimmed, correct me if I'm wrong)
Mocality is a Kenyan business that gathers and aggregates information about the businesses in Kenya to improve the economic state of the country through information infrastructure.
Google (or, apparently, a group contracted by Google) was mining their data and in turn (effectively) selling it. They were undercutting Mocality while at the same time claiming that they had previous arrangements with Mocality to do so.
- sp332 15y agoNot quite right. Kenyan businesses opt-in to listing on Mocality, for free. The Google employees called up businesses on the list, claimed that Mocality was owned by Google, and tried to upsell some web pages. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033 "I’d like you to meet Douglas. On this call (first 2 minutes) you can clearly hear Douglas identify himself as Google Kenya employee, state, and then reaffirm, that GKBO is working in collaboration with Mocality, and that we are helping them with GKBO, before trying to offer the business owner a website (and upsell them a domain name). Over the 11 minutes of the whole call he repeatedly states that Mocality is with, or under (!) Google."
- a-priori 15y agoYup, that's pretty much it. The important part is the last bit: they claimed that there was a partnership between Google and Mocality, and used that lie to extract payment from Mocality's clients.