A new way to profit from your mobile phone?

A new way to profit from your mobile phone? Well, possibly if you live in Kenya and you can speak fluent Masai.

Mobile phone use is growing rapidly in third world countries. The reason is that in countries like Africa the price of mobile phones has fallen to below $20. In fact so rapid has the uptake of mobile phones been that whole ways of life have been changed. Instead of meeting to form work gangs, jobs are organised by text messages. There is still a shortage of jobs and on a daily basis about half the working population finds itself without work.

A new system has been developed that allows these people to perform human intelligence tasks over their mobile phones and make some money. A large task is broken down into a set of tiny tasks which subscribers can complete on their mobile phones.

The system has already been launched in Kenya and will soon be launched in Rwanda. Many of the tasks required are translations. The earnings are not huge, but can be around $1.50 an hour, which is a significant rate in these economies. In area where not many people can afford a phone even cheap mobile phones, it is possible to have multiple user accounts on a single phone, so that one phone can be used by many villagers. A villager will just need to send a special code to log into their personal account.

Some of the tasks that are being carried out using this system are transcription where several lines of audio are converted into a text message, translation into local languages (of which there are sixty in Kenya), journalism where local news is relayed, improving search engine efficiency, surveys and a host of other tasks.

This innovation is making a significant improvement to the standard of living for a great many people bring tremendous benefits to these regions.

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