Nathan Eagle the founder of txteagle, gave an incredible talk at ETech '09 about crowdsourcing on mobile phones in the developing world. Nathan said some truly remarkable things about mobile phone adoption in Africa:
- Majority of mobile phone subscribers today, live in the developing world
- The developing world is where we are seeing a lot of the innovation
- Africa, is the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world
- Kenya has some mobile phone services that are many years beyond what we have right now
- Day labor in many parts of Nairobi is organized via sms
- Now 30% of Rwandan's buy their electricity using their mobile phone
- There are over 2 billion literate, mobile phone subscribers in the developing world, many living on less than $5 a day
- Corporations pay people to accomplish millions of simple text-based tasks
- txteagle enables these tasks to be completed via text message by ordinary people around the globe
1 comments:
Have you ever looked at Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/)? This is a site where programs can post small work items (via web services) and individuals can make a few pennies.
Amazon describes this a a "Human Utility" much like their EC2 Compute Utility and Storage Utility. There are some jobs better suited to humans than computers.
When the machines take over we will all be plugged into something like this :).
Unfortunately it seems like its used mostly for click-fraud :). You pay somebody 0.02 to click on an advertisement on your web page and then you make 0.25 per click from Goodle Adwords!
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