He got a lot of press for the idea, but not everyone liked it. Critics called this type of outsourcing “profiteering” and “exploitation.” Eagle insisted that this wasn’t his intention — but two years later, he has to admit: His critics may have been on to something. I caught up with Eagle at our Mobilize conference earlier this week, and he told me that the realities of outsourcing didn’t match up with his expectations. As a for-profit company, Txteagle was suddenly pushed to find the cheapest workforce possible, and leave markets as quickly as it entered them. “That pushed us down a direction that… wasn’t really what we set out to do,” said Eagle. Check out my entire interview with him below:

So Txteagle changed course, and eventually its name as well. The company is now called Jana, which is Sanskrit for people, and utilizes the same technical infrastructure that enabled labor outsourcing to conduct surveys and marketing. Jana has integrated its platform into the billing system of 230 mobile phone operators in 80 countries worldwide, making it possible to access more than two billion consumers.

Eagle couldn’t tell me much about the corporate clients of his company, but he said that one of the customers is the United Nations, which once sent teams all over the world to survey people about disaster preparedness. Now, the U.N. is using Jana to reach out to people for a fraction of the cost.

However, what gets Eagle really excited these days is the prospect of mobile marketing, coupled with the incentive of payments to consumers. Take a survey about your brand preferences or buy a certain brand of laundry detergent, and you’ll get some free air time in exchange: air time that’s not only expensive in many countries around the world, but that can increasingly also be used to buy real goods, pay for electricity bills and more.

Of course, this new direction won’t persuade globalization critics, who might just see it as another cheap ploy to mess with local markets. Eagle, however, shrugs these kinds of objections off, because he has a bigger goal in mind: He wants to redistribute wealth through mobile technology. Global brands should move their marketing dollars in emerging markets to consumers instead of spending them on billboards, said Eagle during his Mobilize keynote, calculating that a reallocation of 30 percent of these ad budgets could cause a seismic shift: “You could give one billion people a five-percent raise,” he said.

Image courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user Bindalfrodo.

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To make his case, Eagle cited a few key facts:

• There are currently around 5.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide. More than three billion of these are from emerging markets.
• People in emerging markets spend more than $200 billion on airtime every year.
• On average, ten percent of a person’s income in emerging markets goes towards airtime purchases.
• More than 90 percent of that airtime is prepaid, as opposed to a monthly plan.
• In many of these countries, airtime is becoming a currency that replaces traditional cash payments.

Eagle has been working in the last few years on utilizing this need for airtime with a startup called txteagle that offers consumers free airtime in exchange for answers to surveys and similar tasks. On Monday Eagle announced that txteagle is rebranding as JANA, which is Sanskrit for people. “We are all about the people,” he said, only to propose a bold idea: What if advertisers would shift a small percentage of their ad spending towards airtime credits? “Instead of going into the pockets of people who own billboards… give it to consumers,” he suggested.

JANA has been working on making such new forms of advertising possible by integrating their solution into the billing system of 230 operators in 80 countries, reaching a potential audience of more than two billion people. One of the recent projects included surveys by the World Bank to see how much a kilogram of rice costs around the world, another involved a partnership with NPR’s Planet Money that asked people around the world what they would do with $15.

The bigger story behind reaching these consumers and empowering them through airtime credits is the immense growth of discretionary spending in developing countries over the coming decades – a trend that Eagle called a wonderful thing and that he cautioned not to ignore. “We are gonna be dwarfed by these emerging markets,” he said, adding: “It’s the story of our lifetime.”

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It’s definitely an interesting idea. But to me, the real story is how mobile phones have transformed a country like Kenya in recent years, making not only services like Txteagle possible, but also shaking up the region’s entire economic system.

Eagle spent the last few years going back and forth between Kenya and the U.S., and he witnessed this transformation firsthand. I caught up with him after his talk to learn more. According to Eagle, local incumbent Safaricom had started a minute-sharing service for its prepaid cell phone plans a few years back. The idea was to enable users to send minutes to family members in rural areas, who weren’t otherwise able to buy prepaid phone cards. However, Kenyans quickly came up with other uses. “Lots and lots of people were using it as a surrogate for currency,” Eagle said. “[You] could literally pay for taxi cab rides using cell phone credit.”

Safaricom realized a huge opportunity and started a mobile payment service called M-PESA. To call M-PESA a success would be an understatement, according to Eagle. “Within about a year, (Safaricom) became the biggest bank in East Africa.” Today you can use your phone to pay for cab rides and electricity, to get money out of ATMs without owning an ATM card or even having a traditional bank account.

Eagle shared another striking example of the transformative power of mobile payments during his ETech talk. Rural communities used to have to pay a lot of money upfront in order to get a modern well capable of providing clean drinking water. Now, there are companies that install these wells for free, complete with an integrated cell phone payment system. Want some water? Just pay as you go with your M-PESA account.

“It has transformed the country,” says Eagle

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