Source: txteagle
"The total amount of idle time literate, English speaking mobile phone subscribers have within the developing world is estimated to be more than 250,000,000 hours every day. Given high rates of unemployment and marginal income sources, much of this population would greatly benefit from even an extra dollar per day."
Interesting article in the 14 February 2009 New Scientist by Anil Ananthaswamy. The article is partly about Nathan Eagle's txteagle, a service that "allows rural Kenyans to earn airtime and money by performing small tasks such as translation and transcription using their mobile phones" (from whose site the above excerpt is taken), but it develops into a more general discussion about mobile phones, and the credit they hold, as payment-transaction devices in less developed countries, using Safaricom (a mobile-phone based banking system) as an example.
Nathan Eagle is a research scientist at MIT and his Nokia-funded work on "reality mining" is also of interest.
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