Micro-outsourcing on Mobiles

Continuing the recent mobile focus, here’s a story from Kenya again. txteagle is a system that allows mobile phone users complete simple tasks for small payments in airtime or money.

The platform connects clients who have suitable micro-outsourcing tasks such as local language translation or picture identification, to end-users with local knowledge or simply some free time. The New Scientist has a piece on them this issue:

David, a Masai herdsman from Kisumu in Kenya, answers a call on his cellphone. After listening to the message, he repeats a short phrase in his Masai dialect. He then listens to another short message, and repeats the new phrase. After 30 minutes, he ends the call, having earned enough for a week’s worth of personal cellphone airtime.

And M-PESA crops up yet again:

Paying people for their services in rural Africa – where there is no extensive banking or internet infrastructure – needed some innovation. This came just as Eagle was developing txteagle. Kenyan cellphone company Safaricom had a scheme in place which allowed people to exchange cellphone airtime in lieu of currency. “At the market, I could pay for my groceries by  transferring airtime,” says Eagle. Buoyed by the scheme’s success, in early 2008 Safaricom created M-PESA, a mobile banking system that allows people to transfer money between M-PESA accounts using their cellphones. The money can be cashed at post offices.

In no time, Safaricom became one of the largest banks in east Africa and Eagle was able to pay txteagle contributors by crediting their M-PESA accounts. Later this year, he hopes to expand the service to countries such as Rwanda and the Dominican Republic.

For me a few questions remain. The real potential of such a system could be unlocked if micro-contracts can be submitted by anyone- such as with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. This might allow the volume of activity to explode, creating the conditions for it to become a meaningful income supplement for thousands of individuals. But how could this be achieved whilst maintaining the elegance of the system? Second, how can the end-users (and equally the clients) climb the value chain if they have specific talents or skills. For example, there may be more high value tasks that individual are in a position to complete via mobile phones. Matching and sustaining more complex transactions may be challenging.

Hat tip: PSD Blog and Digital Planet.