Txteagle: MTurk competitor with a twist | Hacker News Reader

Txteagle: MTurk competitor with a twist

txteagle.com

7 pointslecha4 comments

Uh, what? I thought the draw of MTurk was that you could offer up several hundred $0.01-0.05 tasks, get a decent response for $10 or so. Unless SMS prices are significantly cheaper elsewhere in the world, this would cost the user $0.20 per job, so you would likely have to be paying some place in the realm of $0.30+ to get any real completion rate.

SMS prices are much, much cheaper in the developing world. I've heard you can get cellphone data plans in africa for less than a dollar a month?

Text messages are very very cheap everywhere except in the US. In the US it looks like the phone companies have created a cartel to make a ton of money from text messages.

Text messages are carried in the control signal in a wireless system. Ie amount of actual communication bandwidth used by a text = 0! Amazing huh?

I dont understand why no one in the US says anything about this. I think the charges from SMS amount to well over 1 billion dollars for each carrier per year.

Note that txteagle model is to split revenue with a mobile provider. This means the agreement between txteagle and a telco with a completely different pricing scheme for SMS messages. USSD is another alternative.

From http://txteagle.com/faq.html

"Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) is a common protocol common to all GSM phones that enables services such as checking an airtime balance (dialing 144#) or topping up with an airtime scratch card (141#12345678912#). Because over 95% the Kenyan and Rwandan mobile phone markets are prepaid, subscribers are extremely familiar with USSD applications and, unlike SMS, there is no fee associated with its usage. (In Kenya, this has meant that balance enquiry events occur more often than actual phone calls!) USSD is also sessions based, as opposed to SMS which is store-and-forward, which means there is very little latency with interactive USSD-based services, making it an ideal platform for menu-driven applications such as surveys. In collaboration with MTN Rwanda and Safaricom, we are developing a USSD txteagle service that is scheduled to launch in both countries during the summer of 2009. "

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