Nokia Taps into Crowdsourcing Start-up to Employ Developing World’s Poor via Mobile Phone

Kate Greene of MIT Technology Review reports today on txteagle, an American start-up founded by Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, which has already signed up the Finnish telecommunications giant Nokia as a partner. 

 The idea of txteagle is pretty simple: it distributes straightforward work tasks via mobile phone to underemployed people in the developing world, many of whom Eagles claims make less than $3 a day. The work itself consists of ‘Human Intelligence Tasks’ (HIT’s) – the kind of jobs that computers aren’t currently very good at, such as digital image tagging, translation, and audio transcription.

As an example, Greene cites how a user could listen to a short audio clip, transcribe it by hand, and then copy this into an SMS message to send back to txteagle. Eagle claims a proficient user could produce this work in two minutes, and by this measure could earn $3 an hour, which is 60% cheaper than Western transcription rates.

“More people are mobile phone users in developing world countries than in the developed world,” he told Green, “So we can get a user base in the billions.”

All payments would be sent and received by mobile phones, using M-PESA, a popular mobile banking service owned by Safaricom, a Kenyan company that’s part owned by Vodafone. The reliability/quality of workers would be ranked using an algorithm txteagle is developing, and the users who produce consistently good work are rewarded with more tasks and an opportunity to make more money.

Txteagles’s business model is comparable to that of Amazon’s ‘Mechanical Turk’ crowdsourced marketplace service – also known as ‘M-Turk’. Aptly, the name ‘Mechanical Turk’ refers to a chess playing automaton that toured Europe the 18th century; its Austro-Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen tricked the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin, beating them with a machine that was in fact operated by a very human chess master, who was stowed within a special compartment.

Amazon has faced criticism for M-Turk though, which was described as “the dark side of globalisation” by American tech worker union activist Marcus Courteney in a 2006 Slate.com article by journalist Katherine Mieszkowski. In the piece, Miezkowski talks to Kristy Milland, a 27 year old mother of two, who would work for M-Turk while looking after her children, making approximately US $30 for eight hours of work. Rebecca Smith, a lawyer for the National Employment Law Project, described Amazon’s practise in the piece as “an example of cyberspace overtaking a country’s labour laws.”

The benefits to workers in certain developing world countries are perhaps more marked though, where the money offered by txteagle compares very favourably with other menial tasks they might be doing. However, the implications to the future world information-economy are stark: crowdsourced labour services like txteagle and Mechanical Turk offer massive potential rewards for Western businesses, with a hyper-division of labour that is undoubtedly efficient, with the flipside of the equation being an ever-more casualised labour force, locked in a ferocious competition with millions of others for relatively unskilled work, and for whom the employer bears no real responsibility.

Is this progress? On the one hand, it could lead to a more fluid global labour market, offering better wages and more convenient, flexible conditions for workers in developing world countries. On the other, it could be viewed as cunning means by which Western corporations can further consolidate their power over emerging economies, and siphoning wealth out of them without investing money in local infrastructure or helping to develop skills. 

Meanwhile, Nokia has signed up for 100,000 language based tasks in Kenya through txteagle, and Eagle says that grant funding should enable him to roll out his service in Rwanda, Kenya, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic in the next 12 months. Interestingly, he also has plans to use the service in paid citizen journalism initiatives.

Posted by Jack Roberts in Hot Money | January 21, 2009 2:52PM |