Location: Massachusetts, UNITED STATES

Company: Jana / MIT / Harvard University

Short bio:
Nathan Eagle is the CEO of txteagle Inc. He holds faculty appointments at the MIT Media Laboratory and Northeastern University, and is an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. His research involves engineering computational tools, designed to explore how the petabytes of data generated about human movements, financial transactions, and communication patterns can be used for social good. As a Research Scientist at MIT and Fulbright Scholar in 2006, he launched MIT's EPROM initiative, developing a mobile phone programming curriculum that has been adopted by twelve Computer Science departments across Sub-Saharan Africa. Thousands of African computer science students have gone through his curriculum, leading to hundreds of mobile applications designed specifically for the African market, as well as a significant number of local start-ups. One such start-up is txteagle, a company he formed in 2008 with the goal of enabling the 2 billion mobile phone subscribers living in the developing world to generate income using their phones. He holds a BS and two MS degrees from Stanford's School of Engineering; his PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory on Reality Mining was declared one of the '10 technologies most likely to change the way we live' by the MIT Technology Review. In 2008, Nokia named him as one of the world's top mobile phone developers, and in 2009, he was elected to the TR35, a group of the top innovators under 35. His academic work has appeared in Science, Nature and PNAS; and his research featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and CNN.

Expert in:
Business Opportunities/Services, Web Technology, UI Design, Usability, Location Based Services