Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

Following on from Haque’s theme of organization as the next industrial revolution (that I wrote about a couple days ago) comes the story of txteagle, an innovative company I learned about this morning via an article in Technology Review.

As a lot of you know, using mobile phones to accomplish tasks in developing countries around the world, most notably the sending and receiving of money, has become more prevalent. This is due to the fact that developing nations have jumped right from no phones to cell phones and, since the phones are very affordable, a lot of people own them (billions of people actually).

txteagle is a new company looking to leverage the mobile phone to provide a conduit into developing nations for businesses that need certain tasks, like translating text and transcribing audio, completed.  txteagle realized a while back that companies pay people good money to accomplish these millions of text based tasks but companies haven’t really ever tapped developing nations to help with this kind of work. This is partly due to the fact that people in developing nations can be spread out and hard to reach.  This is where txteagle’s product comes in.

txteagle has built a system that can distribute text based tasks, such as translating a passage or transcribing an audio clip, to mobile phone users in developing nations via text messages.  Since there are over 1.5 billion literate mobile phone subscribers in the developing world and because text messaging is a very basic phone feature (meaning most every phone has the capability) txteagle has a large network to tap.

Folks who receive text messages from txteagle and complete the tasks asked of them can typically earn the equivalent of about $3 per hour for their work.  While this may not seem like a lot to us what you need to consider is that most of the people txteagle “hires” actually make less than $3 per day.  Also, the $3 per hour rate that txteagle pays, while being great for the “employees”, is also great for the company paying to have the work done. How great? The $3 per hour rate is about 60% less than current transcription rates.

txteagle is a great example of organizing a group of people in a different way to form a business that creates profits for the business and a less expensive service for customers while also creating a better life for the people who actually do the work.  I am sure we’ll see more of these innovative organization based ideas come about and I am excited to see how they will create a better world for all of us.