Crowd-Sourcing SMS Market Efficiency in Africa
Had an idea this morning for a huge social impact in Africa. To bring you up to speed quickly I’ll summarize three articles as background in 1 sentence each:
1) By late 2010 high-speed internet access will be cheap/affordable across most of Africa: http://www.o3bnetworks.com/press_quickstart.html?mod=2_1571_leftbox
2) Small pockets of people doing SMS messaging to inform farmers of fair market prices are helping to improve the income/economic efficiency of their regions:
http://whiteafrican.com/2008/12/01/tanzanian-farmers-and-their-sms-empowered-market-spy/
3) Ushahidi, an innovative African web startup that “Crowd Sources Crisis Information” has been hugely successful: http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2008/11/11/ushahidis-volunteers-rock/
Imagine a site that crowd-sources fair pricing information – the same info currently exchanged on a small/unorganized scale via SMS messaging. A site as simple as Twitter could be used with success today, but a site designed for the job that tracked pricing information simultaneously across thousands of products would bring market efficiency incredibly fast.
It’ll be amazing to see the explosive pace of innovation coming out of Africa in the next three years.
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