Txteagle

Txteagle is a company that crowdsources tasks to billions of consumers in the developing world, reaching them through mobile phone networks and compensating them with airtime or text messages. Txteagle has enabled companies, charities, NGOs, and other groups to reach consumers in the developing world. This new interaction has had a variety of positive impacts on global development.

Users

It enables multi-national corporations to expand their markets to billions of new consumers in the developing world. Corporations that typically serve the developed world can now do research and product development oriented toward low income consumers. This should benefit people in the developing world by generating products that are geared specifically toward their needs and are priced affordably as well. Performing market research through mobile devices should radically accelerate these corporations efforts at a fraction of the cost it would require otherwise.

The U.N., charities, and other NGOs working in the developing world can now use Txteagle for gathering information rapidly in the developing world. This is particularly useful for areas suffering from natural disaster, epidemics, food shortages, and other emergencies. This is, in fact, how Txteagle was started. The founder was working in Kenya to teach mobile phone programming and developed an app that let nurses report blood supply levels in local hospitals by text message(thenextweb). These sort of implementations can be used to more efficiently distribute emergency supplies and coordinate relief efforts. This will shorten and contain the effects of disaster situations in the developing world.

Txteagle is currently working with The Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction. Their objective is to launch a massive survey across multiple countries to assess disaster preparedness in these regions. This is in response to the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. The hope is that Txteagle can be leveraged to acquire responses to some 50,000 surveys across 48 different countries. The key is cost: conventional face to face survey methods before cost the organization some $125 per response. With Txteagle's SMS and USSD text message based system it will cost approximately $5 per survey. This means a much larger, and hence statistically reliable, population of people can be surveyed. This project promises to aid economic development by helping the U.N. more accurately focus its efforts in increasing disaster preparedness around the world.^[1]

Txteagle's founder, Nathan Eagle, has proposed additional uses for the service as well. Translation tasks can easily be issued through the service and performed at a cost less than half of current translation and with similar accuracy. This is important for emerging economies particularly in South Asia and Africa where countries often have many different languages, Kenya alone has 60. It also creates a larger base of potential "citizen journalists" and provides an avenue of compensation for them. This could result in considerably greater media content produced in the developing world and with greater relevancy to issues in those regions.^[2]

Technological Advantage

Txteagle stands out in that it employs two key technological advantages. Txteagle takes advantage of a protocol called USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Data Service) which has the key benefits of not incurring airtime or data fees and putting very low strain on cellular networks. Also, Txteagle's statistical analysis formulae and ability to access large bodies of respondents makes its surveys and other statistics-based services extremely dependable.^[3] The other great benefit to Txteagle is that it significantly expands people's ability to use their mobile phones. Almost all mobile phone subscriptions in the developing world are prepaid plans where users pay by the text or minute. Since text messages typically cost about 10 cents a minute and wages in the developing world are often $2-3 dollars a day, mobile phone use can be prohibitively expensive.^[4] Txteagle compensates its users with airtime or text messages credited directly to their accounts when they complete the tasks that they are sent. This is a much more affordable way of accessing cell phone services than paying directly. It is also more desirable than receiving direct payments from Txteagle because there is no fee associated with getting airtime like there is in withdrawing from or depositing to a bank. With mobile phones cheaper to use hopefully people in the developing world will gain greater access to information and communications services and the economic benefits that come with it.

Most importantly Txteagle's model is successful and extremely broadly applied. It has agreements with hundreds of cell phones carriers in dozens of countries.^[5] It achieves such success by keeping the basic model of compensation for small tasks with mobile credit but changing its marketing strategies from culture to culture. This flexible strategy has made it popular everywhere and it now touts the ability to reach 2.1 billion users.^[6]

Txteagle promises to provide considerable resources to corporations and valuable income to people in developing regions. It also will dramatically boost not only communications capacity within the developing world but also between the developing and rich world. These newly found ties promise to create business connections, transfer information, and provide services at an unprecedented rate in the developing world which will likely accelerate economic growth there significantly.

References