Virtual outsourcing : Mobile work | The Economist

/17366137

  • Tout sur txteagle, une société qui fait travailler des millions d’Africains via leur téléphone mobile.

    Virtual outsourcing : Mobile work | The Economist
    http://www.economist.com/node/17366137

    A way to earn money by texting
    Oct 28th 2010

    THE idea came to Nathan Eagle, a research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when he was doing a teaching stint in rural Kenya. He realised that, as three-quarters of the 4.6 billion mobile-phone users worldwide live in developing countries, a useful piece of technology is now being placed in the hands of a large number of people who might be keen to use their devices to make some money. To help them do so, he came up with a service called txteagle which distributes small jobs via text messaging in return for small payments.

    Only 18% of people in the developing world have access to the internet, but more than 50% owned a mobile-phone handset at the end of 2009 (a number which has more than doubled since 2005), according to the International Telecommunication Union. One study shows that adding ten mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts growth in GDP per person by 0.8 percentage points.

    Crowd-Sourcing the World - Technology Review
    http://www.technologyreview.com/business/21983/page1

    How Txteagle Distributes Microtasks Worldwide
    http://www.workingknowledge.com/blog/workforce-innovation-how-txteagle-distributes-microtasks-worldwide

    The types of tasks Txteagle’s African workers have done are:
    enter details of local road signs for creating satellite navigation systems
    translate mobile-phone menu functions into the 62 African dialects (for Nokia)
    collect address data for business directories
    fill out surveys for international agencies

    Txteagle seems similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, except that workers only need a simple mobile phone – no computer or Internet access is needed. TxtEagle now has partnerships with 220 mobile operators in more than 80 countries. This expands Txteagle’s reach to 2.1 billion cellphone users in sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil and India, who can all participate as workers. Currently, the firm earns revenues 49 countries.

    Une vidéo du fondateur, Nathan Eagle, à une conf. O’Reilly :
    http://blip.tv/oreilly-emerging-technology-conference/etech-09-nathan-eagle-txteagle-crowd-sourcing-on-mobile-phones-in-the-developin
    et l’article correspondant :
    http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/623
    Eagle a fondé un cours d’informatique dédié dans plusieurs universités africaines :

    I moved to East Africa over three years ago, where I have been working with mobile phone operators and launching Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles (EPROM - eprom.mit.edu) programs, an initiative I began in 2006 to teach mobile phone programming within local computer science departments in order to develop applications specifically for local users. Despite the incredible growth of mobile phone usage, these applications are rare. Furthermore, the computer science curricula of universities across the continent still focus on traditional desktop computer programming.

    As a result, African computer science graduates are poorly equipped to address the computing needs of African people. To date, EPROM courses are being taught in over a dozen countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, empowering thousands of African computer science students with the skills needed to program phones, leading to hundreds of applications designed specifically for the African market, as well as several start-up ventures based in Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and beyond.

    Le système de transfert d’argent via mobile M.PESA :
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

    #téléphone #mobile #internet #afrique #kenya