Nathan Eagle, 33, believes mobile phones can fundamentally transform lives, especially in the developing world. An Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, he researches how the resulting data on human movement, financial transactions and communication patterns can be used for social good.

In 2006, as a Research Scientist at MIT and a Fulbright Scholar, Eagle launched MIT’s EPROM initiative, developing a mobile phone programming curriculum that is being taught across sub-Saharan Africa. The result: Hundreds of home-grown mobile applications designed for the African market, as well as a significant number of local startups.

Two years ago Eagle formed txteagle, a company designed to enable the developing world’s 2 billion mobile phone subscribers to generate income using their phones. According to UN data released in late February, as many as 57 percent of people in developing nations had a mobile phone subscription as of December 2009. Txteagle is on its way to becoming Kenya’s largest employer, with a worker base that will soon exceed 10,000 users.

We spoke about the evolving role of mobile in developed and developing markets.

Describe your work with txteagle.

Txteagle is a commercial corporation that enables people to earn small amounts of money on their mobile phones by completing simple tasks for our corporate clients. We’re piggybacking on a couple of interesting innovations.

First, the fact that mobile phone penetration is growing exponentially. Africa is the fastest-growing mobile market in the world. This penetration is occurring with individuals who simply don’t have any other technology. Nairobi is a great example. You see day laborers being organized through SMS—those guys working on the side of the road are earning about $1.50 a day, but they have to have a phone to get that job. It really is fundamentally transformative.

The other coinciding piece of technology is what’s called M-Pesa in Kenya—it’s essentially mobile money or the infrastructure that enables people to send and receive money. When you combine that infrastructure with this massive penetration, a real opportunity emerges. You can get people to start doing knowledge-based work—anything from transcription to translation.

There’s a wide range of things humans can simply do better than computers. Large corporations have billions of these types of tasks that need to be done. Instead of pushing this work into warehouses filled with work stations in a place like Bangalore, we’re redirecting that stream of work to a distributed workforce of people with mobile phones. From my laptop, I can instantly send money in denominations as low as $1 to any of the over 5 million M-Pesa users in Kenya, and they can redeem it for cash.

It’s phenomenally empowering. People can start monetizing their downtime. And they don’t necessarily have to be the more traditional income generators who are typically males.

How do you see mobile money evolving in the near future?

The vast majority of mobile phone subscribers on the planet today are prepaid. For most developing-world countries, a small amount of air time is equivalent to a small amount of money being paid. There are a lot of these markets we’re paying people in air time. And it doesn’t seem to affect people’s willingness to do this work.

[M-Pesa] really has changed the lives of people. The carrier can suddenly become a bank. Now virtually every operator in emerging markets is trying to get on that bandwagon.

Tell me about your research into the digital tracking of human movement and transactions.

We as a species now are leaving a huge amount of digital traces in the wake of our behavior, whether that behavior is riding the bus, making a phone call, buying a latte with your credit card, buying airplane tickets. Virtually any activity we do has some type of digital signature.

This is not just an artifact of life in the Western world. In fact, the majority of these digital traces are coming from the developing world. These are the regions that don’t necessarily have the infrastructure [or resources] for traditional urban planning or disease surveillance—I believe this massive amount of data that’s being generated can be used to better design cities, to build better disease surveillance models, to do things that ultimately are going to improve the lives of billions of people.

In your opinion, what is the role of mobile devices today? And how do you see this evolving?

I see mobile as a secretary that you have a very intimate relationship with. It basically keeps all your secrets about your behavior, who your social circle is, everything you do, everything you like. This is a little agent that sits in your pocket that knows an awful lot about you. And it’s an agent that you implicitly have to trust completely.

It’s also an agent that can start negotiating deals on your behalf. There’s going to be an interesting trend there in terms of making sure we are very explicit with our mobile devices about what we want shared and why. It’s going to give you the salient information you need and negotiate the best prices and services on your behalf. That’s how I envision it in the Western world.

In the developing world, the mobile phone is the device. In the Western world we take for granted the infrastructure we have in place. We have credit cards, right? So we don’t need our phone to be that credit card. In a place like Kenya, you want convergence in terms of functionality, because you’re only going to buy one device, and you need it to be a flashlight, an FM radio and a credit card. That’s why we’re seeing a lot of the innovation and a lot of these mobile banking services in these emerging markets before we see them here in the States.

You’re going to keep seeing this increase in functionality on the single device. We want to transform the phone into a platform to do work and earn money. I believe this is the most empowering functionality that could be added to a mobile phone.

What about mobile philanthropy?

I don’t think calling it mobile philanthropy is accurate. What we’re seeing is mobile payments getting their foot in the door through philanthropic causes. People are suddenly now familiar with the fact that “Hey, I can give $10 to Haiti on my mobile phone. Well, I should be able to give $10 to Starbucks on my mobile phone.”

This has been a great way for this population to get familiar with what Kenyans are already very intimate with in terms of using their phone for purchasing or receiving money.

How do you see crowd-sourcing developing in the mobile sphere?

People are going to start thinking about their downtime a bit differently. My hope is that people will realize they are able to start doing something meaningful, something of value both monetarily and perhaps socially, on their mobile phone. There really is something here in terms of being able to start harnessing a large group of people, all carrying around the device, to go do something meaningful.

It’s a wonderful resource to tap into, because if you’ve built this platform, you get 3 million people’s opinion about X immediately. So it’s a wonderful tool for things like market research, but it can be used for all sorts of things. It’ll be exciting to see how this plays out.

What I like is this idea of very specific tasks for very specific people. One example of this would be the rural nurses within Kenya. In Kenya, central blood bank repositories need real-time information about the supplies at remote blood banks. What I think is a great example of crowd-sourcing is being able to empower these [nurses] in remote places with the ability to provide this critical piece of information and be compensated for it.

You could start thinking about how that type of idea—being able to design, manage and evaluate work from a very distributed workforce—can scale to virtually any industry. There’s all sorts of jobs in the West that require a distributed workforce going out and evaluating, validating and data gathering in a distributed geographic area.

What’s on your personal “things to watch” list?

I think mobile payment systems in general are going to revolutionize much of the emerging telecommunication markets. Mobile operators becoming banks is a huge deal, and it’s going to become a bigger deal.

On the flip side, in the Western area, it’s this idea of opt-in data gathering and building policies that enable handsets, devices, whatever, to start acting on the users’ behalf in terms of negotiating these deals. If you knew everything about me, every behavior I’ve ever done, how can you make my life better?

There’s going to be more and more emphasis on, how can we start improving this person’s life, beyond simply compensation for selling you their data? There’s some real meat in figuring out how you can build better services, whether the services are individual advertising when I’m in a particular location or better municipal services—bus systems based on how people actually move rather than on how some urban planner thinks they move.

Photo credit: MIT

Photo credit: txteagle