I just finished watching Nathan Eagle speak at O’Reilly ETech 2009 about his start up, txteagle.

Dr. Eagle’s interest in mobile phones and their broader roles in society brought him to East Africa where really fascinating innovations are taking place. While there, he saw a number of problems:

1. With unemployment in Kenya hovering a little below 50%, many relatively educated people have lots of idle time. With the exploding popularity of mobile phones, a cell phone is often present during downtime.
2. Cellular operators are searching for ways to increase average revenue per user (ARPU) and to distribute the traffic volumes more evenly (less at peak times).
3. Corporations have millions of tasks that humans can do better than computers and cheap communication networks allow those to be distributed via crowdsourcing.

Dr. Eagle’s elegant solution pays Africans (in airtime or mobile money) to complete simple tasks like surveys, translations and transcriptions. As he says, think of it as “mobile Mechanical Turk.” And as he explains in the second half of his speech, there are a number of exciting secondary effects of this empowerment.