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This actually stemmed from an idea Nathan Eagle had a few years ago trying to Mechanical Turk the developing world. The idea being to send micro-tasks (often t

This actually stemmed from an idea Nathan Eagle had a few years ago trying to Mechanical Turk the developing world. The idea being to send micro-tasks (often translation) to people via SMS, then paying them upon successful completion. That never took off with much traction that I know of, primarily because it was hard to find micro-tasks that were worth the money. There is this very weird legal distinction in Africa between airtime and actual money. Mobile money systems like mPesa are more and more prevalent, but if you stop and think for a minute everybody has been loading their phones with 'cash' for time eternal. (and been able to transfer it about) It is only the addition of being able to remove the money from the network as cash that makes mobile money different. But as pointed in the FA, people spend so much money on airtime that for small values of x mobile money and airtime are equivalent. In any case, smart move by Nathan, it is much easier making deals with carriers to buy large swaths of their airtime than integrate with their totally varied mobile money systems.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
I think what nicpottier writes above is the insight to take away from JANA, basically communications budget is a fungible commodity for a lot of people. They really want their communication, there is a way to 'barter' communication credits for work. This works really well because there are more than enough ways to 'spend' mobile credits. Given a currency 'mobile minutes' an exchange rate to the local currency, and a market maker (the telcos) to enable both the currency exchange and the ability to transact and its a pretty cool opportunity.
nodrama 14y ago
I just want to point out that yes, there is a big difference between airtime and actual money. When I buy credit for my pre-paid card, if I want 5 euros credit, I will pay 5 euros + VAT. But because people pay in our local currency, most of them don't notice. So 5 euros credit it's a product and you have to pay VAT. 5 euros deposited in a bank are actual money and you don't have to pay VAT. Of course, this only happens because of legislation.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I think what nicpottier writes above is the insight to take away from JANA, basically communications budget is a fungible commodity for a lot of people. They really want their communication, there is a way to 'barter' communication credits for work. This works really well because there are more than enough ways to 'spend' mobile credits. Given a currency 'mobile minutes' an exchange rate to the local currency, and a market maker (the telcos) to enable both the currency exchange and the ability to transact and its a pretty cool opportunity.

nodrama 14y ago

I just want to point out that yes, there is a big difference between airtime and actual money. When I buy credit for my pre-paid card, if I want 5 euros credit, I will pay 5 euros + VAT. But because people pay in our local currency, most of them don't notice. So 5 euros credit it's a product and you have to pay VAT. 5 euros deposited in a bank are actual money and you don't have to pay VAT. Of course, this only happens because of legislation.