February 12, 2009
SMS scheme taps work force in developing countries
A new scheme that distributes simple tasks via text messages is being used to target a potential untapped work force in developing countries. The BBC reports.
Txteagle is making it possible for many people in countries like Kenya to earn small amounts of money by completing simple tasks like translations or transcriptions.
The service was founded by Nathan Eagle, a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.... "An individual in Kilifi receives the text message saying, please translate the word 'address book'.
"They type in that particular word and it gets sent back to our server, which is collecting a lot of responses from that same task until we are confident we have the right answer.
"Once we get the right answer we push it back to - in this case - Nokia.
"This system enables companies like Nokia to build-up a corpus of these translations, so that they can do software localisation," he said.
He feels that texting tasks like simple translations to participants in developing countries is economical not only in a business sense but also provides participants with an additional source of income.
... All payments for completed tasks are received by mobile phones, using M-PESA, a popular mobile banking service.
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