Mobile Technology in the Developing World

Boston International was pleased to host a discussion with Nathan Eagle, CEO of Jana (formerly txteagle) and the founder of MIT’s Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles (EPROM) initiative, on November 2^nd at 7 pm to discuss the role of mobile technology in the developing world.

Mobile technology has the capacity to improve lives and foster economic and social development throughout the world.  Nowhere has this been more evident than in the varied applications and uses of mobile devices in Sub-Saharan Africa.  MIT’s EPROM initiative is one notable effort that has sparked the use and development of mobile technology in Africa.  Likewise, the work of start-up enterprises like Jana is establishing the means by which mobile phone users in emerging markets can become even more empowered.  Boston International is excited to host Nathan Eagle for a discussion of his work and the power of mobile technology in emerging economies.

About The Speaker

Nathan Eagle is the CEO of Jana. He also serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Harvard University, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Laboratory and a Research Assistant Professor at Northeastern University.  His research involves engineering computational tools, designed to explore how the petabytes of data generated about human movements, financial transactions, and communication patterns can be used for social good.  As a Research Scientist at MIT and Fulbright Scholar in 2006, he launched MIT’s EPROM initiative, developing a mobile phone programming curriculum that has been adopted by twelve Computer Science departments across Sub-Saharan Africa. Thousands of African computer science students have gone through his curriculum, leading to hundreds of mobile applications designed specifically for the African market, as well as a significant number of local start-ups.  One such start-up is Jana, a company he formed in 2009 with the goal of enabling billions of mobile phone subscribers living in the developing world to generate income using their phones.  He holds a BS and two MS degrees from Stanford’s School of Engineering; his PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory on Reality Mining was declared one of the 10 technologies most likely to change the way we live’ by the MIT Technology Review.  In 2008, Nokia named him as one of the world’s top mobile phone developers, and in 2009, he was elected to the TR35, a group of the top innovators under 35.  His academic work has appeared in Science, Nature and PNAS; and his research has been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and CNN.

 

The event took place at 7 p.m. on November 2, 2011 at the Cambridge Innovation Center (http://www.cictr.com/):

One Broadway

Havana Room – 5^th Floor

Cambridge, MA 02142