Nathan Eagle's Blog

This is a piece in the Boston Globe that has been generating a bit of attention within the blogosphere. 

Check it out!

By the end of the month, a company called txteagle will be the largest employer in Kenya. The firm, started in its original form in 2008 by a young computer engineer named Nathan Eagle and, as of this coming June, based in Boston, will have 10,000 people working for it in Kenya. Txteagle does not rent office space for these workers, nor do the company’s officers interview them, or ever talk to most of them.

And, in a sense, the labor that the Kenyan workforce does hardly seems like work. The jobs - short stretches of speech to be transcribed or translated into a local dialect, search engine results to be checked, images to be labeled, short market research surveys to be completed - come in over a worker’s own cellphone and the worker responds either by speaking into the phone or texting back the answer. The workers can be anyone with a cellphone - a secretary waiting for a bus, a Masai tribesman herding cattle, a student between classes, a security guard on a slow day, or one of Kenya’s tens of millions of unemployed. The jobs take at most a few minutes and pay a few cents each (payment is sent by cellphone as well), but a dedicated worker can earn a few dollars a day in a part of the world where that is a significant sum.

The txteagle story is a variety of things: a tale of savvy social entrepreneurs taking advantage of the proliferation of cellphones in much of the developing world, an example of the ability of clever programming to chop big jobs up into tiny discrete chunks and to assess reliability by checking the answers of different workers against each other. But txteagle is also, at the most basic level, a story of how people are rethinking what work can be.

... complete with quotes from Nokia's own Jussi Impio!

                     The landscape oftelecoms

                     The rise of themobile

                     The mother ofinvention

                     Up, up andHuawei

                     New uses formobile phones

                     Internet for themasses

After 5 years of work, my paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is finally coming out! Essentially we show that we can identify behavioral signatures associated with friendship (hanging out on Saturday nights, traveling together, etc). These signatures that have been learned from the data can subsequently be used to infer the topology of a social network without users manually labeling relationships. It's been picked up in the scientific press including Science, BBC Tech, and New Scientist. Big thanks Nokia for supporting this research - the study wouldn't have been possible without some very generous university donations. 

I was recently interviewed about my work in Africa for the CBC radio program Spark. Here is a link to the interview and a description of the show:

On this week's show, Nora chats with Nathan Eagle about designing mobile phone applications in Africa. Nathan is an MIT research scientist and postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.

In October, Nathan plans to launch txteagle, a project that sends people small, simple tasks to do on their cell phones. Nathan observed that you can spend a lot of time waiting in Africa, and that people could put that time to better use by working on their mobile phones. What kind of work are we talking about? Nathan has posted some samples on the txteagle site.

He goes on to talk about some of the genius ideas for new mobile phones apps he's seeing in Africa and highlights one example where mobile phones are changing the way Rwandans pay for their electricity (9:05 in the audio below). He also gives his two cents on what the future holds for mobile tech.

EPROM has recently been featured as a Forum Nokia PRO success story. Here is the article and also a link to the YouTube interview. 

Much of this growth is credited to emerging markets... Greetings from Nairobi!

Prof. Fisseha Mekuria is incorporating the EPROM curriculum into a new master’s degree program at Uganda's largest university.  The objective of the new program is to carry out relevant research in the areas of mobile computing, communications technology, services, and associated enabling policy and regulatory frameworks. The research is structured to promote the sustainable diffusion of wireless communication technology in collaboration with regional public and private industry and organizations. Prof. Mekuria hopes to promote novel usage of mobile phone services as a vehicle for economic development in Uganda and the eastern Africa region.  

   The objective of the new program is to produce graduates with the necessary skills in wireless communications technology, services, and content development. The subjects within the new degree program will include:

• Mobile & Wireless Communications Technology & Services 
• QoS & Mobile Multimedia Networking 
• Mobile Ad Hoc, Sensor & Mesh Networks 
• Wireless & Mobile Broadband Access Networks (IEEE802.1XX S)
• Next Generation Networks and Developing Regions (NGN-DR) 
• Enabling Regulatory & Policy Issues for Next Generation Networks (RP-NGN) 
• Mobile Technology Usability, Content & Service Localization. 
• Mobile Web Content & Web Services  
• Mobile Application Software Development including M-Banking, M-health, M-Learning, M-Commerce, M-Gov 

I'm going to start periodically posting updates from our EPROM initiative at MIT. What has driven this initiative is the fact that today’s mobile phones are designed to meet Western needs. Subscribers in developing countries, however, now represent the majority of 2.4 billion mobile phone users worldwide. Africa is now the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world.

Yet the computer science curricula of universities throughout Africa still focus exclusively on traditional desktop computer programming. As a result, African computer science graduates are not qualified to address the computing needs of African people. 

In early 2006, MIT and Nokia launched a trial initiative called EPROM in East Africa to develop a mobile phone programming curriculum that equips computer science students with the skills to design mobile phone applications specifically for the needs of people in the developing world.  

Now going into its third year, EPROM has undergone considerable expansion - and with requests from dozens of additional universities across Africa, the initiative appears to be providing a much-needed service to the African computer science community. We've now expanded our mobile phone programming courses to 12 Computer Science departments across Sub-Saharan Africa.  This continued growth has led to hundreds of mobile phone applications developed specifically for the African market. Several of these student projects have gathered international media attention, while others are being formed into start-up ventures based in Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Kampala, Kigali and beyond. It's all pretty exciting - I'll be scheduling weekly posts about EPROM for the next couple of months... Stay tuned!

While today's low-end phones in the developing world can offer extremely important services beyond voice / text communication,  these additional services rarely scale beyond small, local markets. With Nokia's annoucement of Life Tools, it looks as if a major corporation is finally getting serious about services for mobile phone subscribers living in the developing world - a market that now has surpassed 2 billion users and represents the majority of mobile phone subscribers today.  

Nokia Life Tools is a range of innovative agriculture information and education services designed especially for rural and small town communities in emerging markets. Nokia Life Tools helps overcome information constraints and provides farmers and students with timely and relevant information. These services use an icon-based, graphically rich user interface that comes complete with tables and which can even display information simultaneously in two languages. Behind this rich interface, SMS is used to deliver the critical information to ensure that this service works wherever a mobile phone does, without the hassles of additional settings or the need for GPRS coverage. Nokia plans to launch the service in the first half of 2009 with the Nokia 2323 classic and the Nokia 2330 classic as the lead devices in India, and expand it across select countries in Asia and Africa later in 2009.

 More information is available here and here.