Name: txteagle
Quick Pitch: Txteagle engages 2.1 billion emerging-market consumers via mobile phones.
Genius Idea: Compensating consumers in developing nations with prepaid mobile airtime for participating in surveys or branded advertising campaigns.
Advertisers and marketers looking for a way to survey consumers or run branded campaigns in developing countries are limited in their abilities to reach these audiences.
Txteagle seeks to change that and boasts a database of more than 2.1 billion prepaid mobile subscribers across 220 operators in 80 countries. It can use the mobile phone to serve as conduit between advertiser and consumer.
The startup uses airtime compensation to sugarcoat its survey and campaign solicitation attempts. Txteagle founder Nathan Eagle says this is because airtime is equivalent to — if not greater than — cash in these countries. Ten percent of an individual’s annual income in emerging markets is spent on purchasing prepaid airtime, Eagle says.
Eagle learned about the research incentive accidentally in 2006 when he was a research faculty member at MIT, and moved to East Africa to teach students at the University of Nairobi how to program applications. While working in the district hospital of Kilifi, he soon found a disconnect between Kenya’s centralized blood bank and rural hospitals that often led to blood shortages.
In 2007, his University of Nairobi students developed a simple SMS application that gave nurses at rural hospitals the ability to text updates of blood supply levels. The system also supplied blood bank officials wi th a real-time...
