txteagle (emerging market mobile crowdsourcing)

I first read about txteagle in the Economist. Since then I have been very very impressed about its model and reach. If you have not heard of or read about txteagle, please get to know this extremely innovative service.

"txteagle helps global organizations learn, educate and grow in emerging economies by leveraging the power of the mobile phone. Through a network of over 2.1 billion mobile phone subscribers across almost 100 developing countries, txteagle leverages the emerging market community for two inter-related services; i) GroundTruth: gathering local data and opinions ii) GroundSwell: leveraging those insights to improve consumer engagement.

GroundTruth is a patent-pending mobile data collection platform that provides unique insight into the opinions, needs and behaviours of consumers in emerging markets – from brand reputation and product performance, to pricing and even local product availability. These insights are incorporated in GroundSwell, txteagle's mobile consumer engagement platform.

GroundSwell enables global organizations to engage with their next billion consumers in emerging markets. As these economies undergo rapid expansion, hundreds of millions of consumers are joining the middle class - resulting in trillions of dollars of new purchasing power. txteagle’s GroundSwell mobile engagement platform provides clients with the ability to communicate and incentivize over 2.1 billion people.

Founded by former MIT faculty member Dr. Nathan Eagle and Dr. Ben Olding from Harvard’s Statistics Department, txteagle has raised funding from top-tier investors that include Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Flywheel Ventures and Esther Dyson."

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How Web 2.0 is changing the way we work: An interview with MIT’s Andrew McAfee

Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of the new book, Enterprise 2.0, speaks with McKinsey’s Roger Roberts, a principal in the Silicon Valley office, in Palo Alto, California, in October 2009.

In the interview, McAfee answers the following questions:
- How is Enterprise 2.0 changing the way we work?
(technology is finally catching up to the way we want to work)
- How do you get this started in an organization?
(deploy tools, talk about objectives, find pockets of energy and signal from the top what you want to happen)
- What else can undermine adoption?
(if they build it, they will come; too concerned with risks and downsides)
- What is the CIOs role in encouraging Enterprise 2.0 and managing the risk?
(in the hot seat to articulate what is going on and how can the company navigate these changes)
- What does this mean for middle managers?
(these technologies are going to greatly reduce your ability to filter information and curtail who you're people are going to talk with and meet with; if you see your job as managing people and that being paramount, these technologies will support you and they will not replace face-time)
- How should companies measure the success of Enterprise 2.0?
(not many are good at measuring investment, companies should think about what they want to happen and select technologies to make this happen best. e.g., intelligence community installed wikis and blogs where people can narrate their work; let people broadcast search, highlighting what you don't know not what you do know)

Video can be viewed here (if the video player is not loading, you can view the interview in its entirety, here:



And the transcript can be read here:
How Web 2.0 is changing the way we work: An interview with MIT’s Andrew McAfee