Kenya Is On Call for Mobile Crowdsourcing

Cellphone entrepreneur Nathan Eagle has most of Kenya on call, waiting for a small job. Millions of them, in fact.

Eagle, an MIT research scientist who has been living and teaching in East Africa since 2006, hopes to enlist cellphone users in developing countries to perform small text-based tasks in return for micro-payments. Think of it as the mobile phone equivalent of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which pays humans to do such things as transcribe audio and tag photos.