Virtual outsourcing
虚拟外包业
Mobile work
移动工作
A way to earn money by texting
Oct 28th 2010 | new york
Mobile worker
移动工作者
THE idea came to Nathan Eagle, a research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when he was doing a teaching stint in rural Kenya. He realised that, as three-quarters of the 4.6 billion mobile-phone users worldwide live in developing countries, a useful piece of technology is now being placed in the hands of a large number of people who might be keen to use their devices to make some money. To help them do so, he came up with a service called txteagle which distributes small jobs via text messaging in return for small payments.
麻省理工学院研究员Nathan Eagle在肯尼亚乡下进行短期教学时，冒出了这一念头。他意识到，全世界46亿手机用户有四分之三生活在发展中国家，因而一项实用技术，此刻正掌握在大量或许渴望用自己手机赚钱的人手中。为帮助他们那样做，Eagle先生想出了一种叫做txteagle的业务，可以靠发文字短信分发零活来换取小额报酬。
Only 18% of people in the developing world have access to the internet, but more than 50% owned a mobile-phone handset at the end of 2009 (a number which has more than doubled since 2005), according to the International Telecommunication Union. One study shows that adding ten mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts growth in GDP per person by 0.8 percentage points.
根据国际电信联盟的数据，2009年底，发展中国家仅有18%的人接入了互联网，却有超过一半的人拥有手机（这一数据自2005年以来增加了一倍以上）。一项研究表明，在一个典型的发展中国家，每百人增加十部手机，会使人均GDP提升0.8个百分点。
Mr Eagle hopes txteagle will do its bit by mobile “crowdsourcing”—breaking down jobs into small tasks and sending them to lots of individuals. These jobs often involve local knowledge and range from things like checking what street signs say in rural Sudan for a satellite-navigation service to translating words into a Kenyan dialect for companies trying to spread their marketing. A woman living in rural Brazil or India may have limited access to work, adds Mr Eagle, “but she can still use her mobile phone to collect local price and product data or even complete market-research surveys.” Payments are transferred to a user’s phone by a mobile money service, such as the M-PESA system run by Safaricom in Africa, or by providing additional calling credit.
Eagle先生希望txteagle业务通过移动“众包”（将工作拆分成零星任务后派发给众多个体）有所贡献。这些工作通常牵涉本地知识，涵盖各种事情，如为一种卫星导航业务核对种种路标在苏丹乡下表明什么，为那些试图扩展市场的公司将文字翻译为肯尼亚土语。一位住在巴西或印度乡下的妇女，或许工作机会有限，Eagle先生补充道，“但她仍能用自己的手机搜集当地价格及产品数据，甚或完成市场调研。”报酬通过一种手机钱包业务（比如非洲Safaricom移动通信公司运营的M-PESA移动转账系统）转到用户手机上，或者打入额外的手机预付费。
Working with over 220 mobile operators, txteagle is able to reach 2 billion subscribers in 80 countries. It already has the largest contract-labour force in Kenya and new ways of using it are being found all the time. Recently a large media firm asked Mr Eagle for help in monitoring its television commercials across Africa. The company was concerned that, although it had paid for broadcasting rights, its ads could be replaced with others by local television companies. So txteagle pays locals to watch and then text notes about which ads are shown. “I would never think of that myself,” says Mr Eagle. Which is why he is not sure just how big all these small text jobs could become.
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