Not-so-little Trademark Faux Pas Leaves Safaricom and Craft Silicon Red-faced

Safaricom and Craft Silicon both took an “L” this past week.

As it turns out, they neglected to trademark the Little Cabs brand name before launching their ride-sharing service some weeks ago. And now,  they’ve had to drop the word “Cab” from their brand after the “Little Cab” trademark-holder went to court to defend his right to use that name. From now on, whey are to be known as Little.

The whole situation is embarrassing to say the least, and reminds me of the wisdom Alpesh Patel shared with me in a taped conversation I had with him some months ago, about how important it is to “dot the i’s and cross the t’s” when it comes to securing one’s commercial intellectual property. Nevertheless, I’m sure the folks at Safaricom and Craft Silicon learned their lesson.

This week’s African Tech Round-up also features a chat I had with Brendan Horan. Brendan is an executive vice president of MiX Telematics— a fleet and mobile asset management solutions business that’s listed on both the Johannesburg and the New York Stock Exchanges, as well as the Managing Director of MiX Telematics’ African business.

Listen in to hear how Brendan’s company goes about applying a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model to deliver solutions to customers in more than 120 countries around the world, how the global AI and machine learning trend is impacting their corporate’s strategy, and how Brendan deals with the challenge of growing the firm’s African business in hugely varied markets across the continent.

Uber Domination

Despite the considerable push-back Uber has experienced in certain African markets, the firm’s march towards utter and complete world domination continued last week as they launched in Tanzania’s capital city, Dar es Salaam.

Dar es Salaam is the 3rd African city Uber has taken to in as many weeks (following Luanda, Uganda and Accra, Ghana) and their 475th location worldwide. Since launching in Johannesburg in 2012, Uber has quietly gone about silencing many of the doubts that sceptics have had about the viability of their business model in African markets that typically show little regard to hype-driven startups that roll in from the West expecting an easy ride. (No pun intended.)

Basically, what might have appeared to some as being a casual African safari is gradually developing into a case study on lean, mean execution. Only time will tell if a home-grown platform like Little Cabs— the ride-hailing service Safaricom is set to launch, will be able to rain on Uber’s parade.

Be sure to listen into this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up to hear my chat with Matthew Lee— a plumber turned corporate executive who now heads up African operations at the German open source software firm, Suse.

Matthew shares insights on how well Africa is keeping up with the rest of the world in terms of producing world-class software applications, and points out key growth areas that could benefit from the increased roll-out of OSS solutions.

First published on AfricanTechRoundup.com.