Crowdsourcing Jobs to a Worldwide Mobile Workforce

A few years ago, Nathan Eagle had a big idea. What if millions of people in poor countries?people who couldn't find work in their local economies?could become a remote workforce for organizations all over the world? And what if, instead of traveling to do such jobs at call centers or other outsourcing offices in big cities, they could do their work quickly, reliably, and easily through text messages on their mobile phones?

Eagle founded a small startup, Txteagle, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to put the idea to the test. It has struck deals with mobile-phone carriers around the world to pay workers in credits for mobile airtime. In many places, that's as good as cash.

But while the concept sounds promising, expanding the business has proved difficult. Eagle told Technology Review this summer that his venture is "going to be binary?a huge hit or a spectacular failure."

One big challenge is to find valuable tasks that can be completed through text messages and phone calls. Eagle got the idea for the company after he created a service that let nurses in the coastal Kenyan village of Kilifi send text messages to tell central blood banks how much blood their hospital had on hand, so its supplies could be refilled more efficiently. Simply compensating the nurses for the cost of their text messages turned out to be the key to its success.

He launched Txteagle in Kenya and eventually had 10,000 people doing part-time tasks such as filling out surveys for international agencies, translating text, or collecting address data for business directories. One of his first partners was Nokia, which paid local people to translate mobile-phone menu functions into the 60 languages used in the country. But that task was quickly exhausted.

Now Txteagle needs to form several solid partnerships with multinational corporations that could supply a steady stream of small tasks. Eagle believes one promising idea is to use Txteagle as a market-research tool: workers could be paid to help companies learn what sorts of products would be desired in their rural corners of the world.

Txteagle recently announced a collaboration with the United Nations, which will use the mobile-phone platform to survey up to 500,000 people in 70 countries about their local governance. That brings the number of countries with Txteagle workers up to 80. The U.N.'s goal is to lay the foundation for future disaster-response efforts by learning how well communities and their governments communicate with each other. People who complete the survey will be paid about $1 and reimbursed for the cost of the text message.

For the U.N. initiative, Txteagle is working with the Global Network for Disaster Reduction, a nonprofit organization that influences policy in more than 90 countries. Most nonprofits operate on a relatively small scale, says Terry Gibson, a project manager at GNDR, but Txteagle allows them to reach a significantly larger audience.

Txteagle isn't the only company exploring ways to crowdsource small tasks to people all over the world. In 2005, Amazon launched its Mechanical Turk project, which sets up a way for a large group of distributed workers to participate in jobs like identifying elements in a set of photographs or performing data entry and transcription. A San Francisco-based startup, CrowdFlower, collaborated with nonprofit organizations this year to have people translate and map text messages that were sent from victims of floods in Pakistan and the earthquake in Haiti. Lukas Beiwald, CEO of CrowdFlower, says his company compensates its workers through PayPal and, in some cases, with virtual currency like the money used in Second Life.

The fundamental technology behind Txteagle includes algorithms for quality control, so that people who do consistently accurate work make higher wages. Workers who recruit others are paid small bonuses. To generate revenue, the company takes a tiny fraction of certain paid transactions.

To make real money with this business model, however, Eagle will need millions of workers using the platform. For now, he estimates, about 100,000 people will be using Txteagle to make money by the end of U.N. survey. And he hopes to find enough partners, with enough of the right sort of small tasks, to push those numbers even higher. "We'd like to be the largest knowledge workforce in the world," he says.

Kate Greene and Nathan Eagle are coauthoring Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World, to be published by MIT Press.

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MilTube: a video-sharing site for the military

The Department of Defense (DoD) needed a dynamic way to share videos of training, ceremonies, and news clips with soldiers around the world. Enter milTube, a website that allows the military workforce to share videos behind secure network firewalls. The site features channels, categories, and tags, so that users can easily watch, upload, sort, and search content. Since all activity takes place behind the DoD firewall, content is protected from unauthorized viewing and distribution, making milTube a safe military alternative to public video-sharing sites.

The site is part of milSuite, a group of integrated tools that mirrors Internet services that are not behind the DoD firewall. It includes milBook, milWiki, milBlog, and now milTube. More than 88,500 employees from the Armed Services already uses milSuite. To meet bandwidth challenges at different military bases, milTube diagnoses platform needs so users can watch and upload videos at any location. Upon launch, it will support multiple video formats, audio-only streaming, as well as both desktop and mobile devices.

"Video is an extremely powerful tool for storytelling and sharing information among personnel," Justin Filler, deputy director of the MilTech Solutions Office, said in a statement. "MilTube provides a secure, internal environment for those connections to take place across the Armed Services."

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Try This: The Feed. Gorgeous new iPad news reader [TNW Apps]

TNW Quick Hit

The Feed is a Google Reader client for your iPad which lets one decide how to consume news.

Hits: Wonderful design,

Misses: The first release of the app can be a bit buggy, with occasional crashes.  No Instapaper support at present.

Overall: 4.5/5

The Details:

Reading news is one of, if not, the thing I enjoy doing most on the iPad.  Initially I was hooked on Early Edition but quickly tired of it.  Reeder replaced Early Edition until my favorite news reader, River of News, was released.  While not ready to rid myself of River of News, a new app, The Feed (free), may soon become my default news reader of choice.

Why?  First, the price.  It?s FREE.  Yes, I?m cheap.  Early Edition and Reeder are both $4.99, while River of News is $3.99.  A hefty price for apps that do no more than aggregate news and allow you to share stories you find interesting.

The Feed is not only free, but features a terrific design reminiscent of Pulse, while offering sharing features that rival the more expensive counterparts listed above.

After launching the app and syncing your Google Reeder account, the super slick display presents itself with all of one?s feeds.

The Feed?s interface offers one an overview of everything on the menu, along with a versatile filtering system and two different zoom levels.  Further, The Feed uses proportionately sized stacks to illustrate your read and unread items, a grand feature.

Should one find something they wish to share, The Feed allows one to do just that.  One can share on Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, email, or simply copy the URL.

The Feed is, without a doubt, a great reader for the iPad.  Version 1.0 does have occasional crashes, and Instapaper support is needed, hopefully these will come in time.  That said, if you like news reader apps on your iPad and seek the best of the best, you?d be hard pressed to find one as grand as The Feed.

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Activision denies plans to charge for COD multiplayer

Rumors recently surfaced suggesting that Activision might implement a subscription model for Call of Duty online multiplayer. According to Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter, the mega-publisher wants to introduce some form of paid access, but the company is waiting until the inevitable backlash will have less effect on sales of COD: Black Ops.

Pachter claims the monetization scheme will begin with a cheap premium membership that provides virtual goods such as special weapons and armor. That will escalate to a more expensive subscription that grants access to map packs and eventually, when the time is right, he says Activision will offer an " all access pass" to play games like COD, WoW and SC2.


"The trick is managing this without destroying sales of the game. They will tread very carefully, and will make sure that they let consumers know that they are NOT taking anything away, but are merely offering a LOT MORE VALUE for a little bit of money," Pachter said. Activision quickly chimed in on the matter and partially refuted the claims.

Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg said that the company would never charge for out of the box Call of Duty online multiplayer. As for Pachter's theory? "He's probably looking at meta-trends in the world and in culture about online services," Hirshberg noted, reassuring IndustryGamers further that Activision would "never, ever charge" for multiplayer.

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Crowdsourcing Jobs to a Worldwide Mobile Workforce

A few years ago, Nathan Eagle had a big idea. What if millions of people in poor countries?people who couldn't find work in their local economies?could become a remote workforce for organizations all over the world? And what if, instead of traveling to do such jobs at call centers or other outsourcing offices in big cities, they could do their work quickly, reliably, and easily through text messages on their mobile phones?

Eagle founded a small startup, Txteagle, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to put the idea to the test. It has struck deals with mobile-phone carriers around the world to pay workers in credits for mobile airtime. In many places, that's as good as cash.

But while the concept sounds promising, expanding the business has proved difficult. Eagle told Technology Review this summer that his venture is "going to be binary?a huge hit or a spectacular failure."

One big challenge is to find valuable tasks that can be completed through text messages and phone calls. Eagle got the idea for the company after he created a service that let nurses in the coastal Kenyan village of Kilifi send text messages to tell central blood banks how much blood their hospital had on hand, so its supplies could be refilled more efficiently. Simply compensating the nurses for the cost of their text messages turned out to be the key to its success.

He launched Txteagle in Kenya and eventually had 10,000 people doing part-time tasks such as filling out surveys for international agencies, translating text, or collecting address data for business directories. One of his first partners was Nokia, which paid local people to translate mobile-phone menu functions into the 60 languages used in the country. But that task was quickly exhausted.

Now Txteagle needs to form several solid partnerships with multinational corporations that could supply a steady stream of small tasks. Eagle believes one promising idea is to use Txteagle as a market-research tool: workers could be paid to help companies learn what sorts of products would be desired in their rural corners of the world.

Txteagle recently announced a collaboration with the United Nations, which will use the mobile-phone platform to survey up to 500,000 people in 70 countries about their local governance. That brings the number of countries with Txteagle workers up to 80. The U.N.'s goal is to lay the foundation for future disaster-response efforts by learning how well communities and their governments communicate with each other. People who complete the survey will be paid about $1 and reimbursed for the cost of the text message.

For the U.N. initiative, Txteagle is working with the Global Network for Disaster Reduction, a nonprofit organization that influences policy in more than 90 countries. Most nonprofits operate on a relatively small scale, says Terry Gibson, a project manager at GNDR, but Txteagle allows them to reach a significantly larger audience.

Txteagle isn't the only company exploring ways to crowdsource small tasks to people all over the world. In 2005, Amazon launched its Mechanical Turk project, which sets up a way for a large group of distributed workers to participate in jobs like identifying elements in a set of photographs or performing data entry and transcription. A San Francisco-based startup, CrowdFlower, collaborated with nonprofit organizations this year to have people translate and map text messages that were sent from victims of floods in Pakistan and the earthquake in Haiti. Lukas Beiwald, CEO of CrowdFlower, says his company compensates its workers through PayPal and, in some cases, with virtual currency like the money used in Second Life.

The fundamental technology behind Txteagle includes algorithms for quality control, so that people who do consistently accurate work make higher wages. Workers who recruit others are paid small bonuses. To generate revenue, the company takes a tiny fraction of certain paid transactions.

To make real money with this business model, however, Eagle will need millions of workers using the platform. For now, he estimates, about 100,000 people will be using Txteagle to make money by the end of U.N. survey. And he hopes to find enough partners, with enough of the right sort of small tasks, to push those numbers even higher. "We'd like to be the largest knowledge workforce in the world," he says.

Kate Greene and Nathan Eagle are coauthoring Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World, to be published by MIT Press.

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Administration to Seek Balance in Airport Screening

Representative John L. Mica, Republican of Florida and a critic of the Obama administration?s new screening methods, says the Transportation Security Administration should look at Israel, which uses early detection techniques at airports. An editorial in The Washington Times last week praised El Al, the Israeli national airline, as employing the ?smarter approach? of using ?sophisticated intelligence analysis which allows them to predict which travelers constitute a possible threat and which do not.?

As it turns out, the security methods employed by Israel?s famous Shin Bet security service at Ben-Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv are frequently stricter and more intrusive than the full-body scanners and pat-downs American officials put into place Nov. 1, said security analysts and the travelers who regularly show up at Ben-Gurion four hours before their flights for screening.

At Ben-Gurion, some passengers have been searched so thoroughly that they have had to walk through the terminals, the gates and up to the doors of their planes with no handbags, wallets or even shoes.

The Israeli approach highlights the difficult balance faced by the Obama administration as it tries to address terror threats without unduly alienating the people it is trying to protect. The Israeli system relies on steps that would be likely to provoke opposition in the United States on civil liberties grounds: collecting detailed information about passengers before they fly. Besides, Israel has only two airports and 50 flights a day, compared with 450 airports and thousands of daily flights in the United States.

The administration argues that by focusing at airports on the search for weapons ? in contrast to the Israelis, who focus in airports on finding terrorists ? the United States is mounting a valuable and necessary last line of defense without undermining civil liberties. The multiethnic population of the United States makes it more difficult here than in Israel to profile possible terrorists, experts say, leaving officials with little choice but to screen passengers carefully for illicit items.

?If you say at the highest level of generality that the American system is looking for weapons and the Israelis are looking for terrorists, obviously we would be better off looking for terrorists, because then we would spare ourselves the silly indignities we imposed on ourselves because of our civil liberties laws,? said Stewart Baker, the author of ?Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren?t Stopping Tomorrow?s Terrorism? and a former official with the Department of Homeland Security. ?But we tried that, tried doing security checks on passengers, and a left-right coalition said, ?You can?t trust the government with this.? ?

Mr. Baker was referring to several proposals for advanced screening that were scrapped during the Bush administration after travel industry and civil liberties groups objected. One plan would have involved checking credit records and criminal histories, along with checking whether passengers were on terrorism watch lists. Based on results, each traveler would have been assigned a risk level. Those deemed dangerous would have been barred from flights.

Critics contended it was an invasion of privacy. The T.S.A. eventually found its way to the screening system it is using now, which searches for weapons instead of relying primarily on profiling people.

On Monday, administration officials said that they would try to iron out the kinks in the system in response to public concerns, but they maintained that the new system would be around as long as there were people seeking to blow up planes. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said the government was ?desperately? trying to balance privacy and security.

The T.S.A. administrator, John S. Pistole, released a public service announcement and video describing the new procedures in advance of the Thanksgiving travel week. Administration officials say that fewer than 3 percent of passengers are receiving pat-downs; people get them if their screening raises an alarm, or if they refuse the body scan.

Representative Mica said that the Israeli model worked because Israeli agents ?try to detect behavior or people?s patterns? by asking them questions. Israeli officials say that any passenger trying to board El Al is subject to questions from security agents.

?Everybody gets asked, who you are, where are you traveling to,? one Israeli official said, speaking on grounds of anonymity because he did not want to speak publicly about the security measures. The agents asking the questions, he said, ?are very well trained.?

?Depending on what you say,? he said, ?they will put you through an additional screening.?

Mr. Baker, the security expert, said: ?Israeli agents focus on the travelers? country of origin, their profession, visas that are stamped in their passports, places they have visited, people they know and the color of their skin. If you say you?re a Renaissance art scholar, they?ll ask you if you know who Titian is.?

Mr. Mica maintained that the Israeli system was not profiling. ?Someone is trained to do it with people who warrant further scrutiny,? he said.

But some travelers say they would rather go through a full body scan than the system at Ben-Gurion airport.

?My experience leaving Tel Aviv was by far and away the most unpleasant encounter I?ve ever had with airport security officials in the decade,? said Matthew Yglesias, a blogger with the Center for American Progress who said it took three hours last month for him to get from the initial security check at Ben-Gurion to the food court. ?As best I could tell, things went pretty smoothly as long as you were Israeli, traveling with an Israeli, or traveling with some kind of well-established tour group.?

Mr. Yglesias was traveling with a group of journalists.

?The African-American woman in our group was taken off to be questioned. A bunch of us were told we couldn?t bring iPads on the plane,? he said. The Jewish member of his group ?had the easiest time,? he said. ?The black woman had the hardest time.?

J. David Goodman contributed reporting from New York.

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New Rules Tell Insurers: Spend More On Care

The rules, intended to benefit consumers, vastly expand federal authority to direct the use of premiums collected by companies like Aetna, Humana, UnitedHealth and WellPoint. While some states have had such requirements, Monday?s announcement is the first such mandate by the federal government and grows out of the new national health care law.

?Millions of Americans will get better value for their health insurance premium dollar,? Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said in issuing the rules.

Ms. Sebelius said the rules would protect nearly 75 million people: 10.6 million with individual policies, 24.2 million with small-group coverage and 40 million covered by large employers.

Starting next year, she said, insurers in the individual and small-group markets must spend at least 80 percent of their premium revenues on medical care and activities to improve the quality of care. Insurers in the large-group market must spend at least 85 percent of premium dollars for those purposes.

Insurers that do not meet the standards next year will have to pay rebates to consumers, starting in 2012. Ms. Sebelius estimated that up to nine million people could get rebates worth up to $1.4 billion. About 45 percent of people with individually purchased insurance are in health plans that do not meet the new standards, known as medical loss ratios, federal officials said.

At a news conference on Monday, administration officials repeatedly refused to respond to Republican attacks on the health care law. Nor would they discuss Republican calls to repeal the law, a centerpiece of President Obama?s domestic agenda.

?We are just trying to implement this regulation,? said Jay Angoff, the rules? chief author. He is director of the Department of Health and Human Services? Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.

He said most insurers should be able to meet the standards because ?their profitability and reserves are at an all-time high.?

However, state officials said the standards could destabilize insurance markets in some states. Specifically, they said they feared that some carriers would withdraw from the market in some states, resulting in fewer choices and less competition.

Under the rules, federal officials can lower the standard for up to three years in states where ?there is a reasonable likelihood that market destabilization, and thus harm to consumers, will occur.?

Mr. Angoff said that Georgia, Iowa, Maine and South Carolina had asked for such adjustments.

Joshua R. Raskin, a senior analyst at Barclays Capital, an investment bank, said, ?With these rules, the federal government will, for the first time, hold health insurance companies accountable for putting a minimum amount of premiums toward medical expenses.?

The rules allow special treatment for health plans that provide limited benefits at a more affordable price. At least 1.4 million people are enrolled in such ?mini-med? plans, which may cap coverage for one or more benefits at $5,000 or $10,000 a year ? or perhaps $25,000.

Employers offering such coverage had said they might end it because they could not meet the 80 percent standard next year.

Premiums are usually lower for mini-med plans than for regular insurance, and administrative costs may be high because these plans often cover employees with high turnover rates. As a result, administrative costs account for a higher share of premium revenues.

In addition, some consumer groups said mini-med plans had higher profit margins than traditional insurance.

?The administration has made a wise accommodation that will temporarily preserve this coverage, which is very important to many employees in the retail and restaurant industries,? said E. Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the National Retail Federation.

The dispensation for mini-med plans is for one year. The government will collect data on these plans next year and decide how to proceed in 2012 and 2013. ?In 2014, we anticipate that these mini-med policies will disappear and be replaced by more comprehensive health plans,? said Steven B. Larsen, a federal insurance regulator.

The rules generally follow recommendations from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which represents state regulators.

However, ?we have a difference of opinion? on one point, said Jane L. Cline, the insurance commissioner of West Virginia and president of the association.

State officials said Mr. Obama should allow states to phase in the requirements over several years, to avoid disruption of the individual or small-group insurance market. The White House said, ?The law allows adjustments of the medical loss ratio for the individual market in a state and does not apply to the small-group market.?

Consumers Union, the American Heart Association and Democratic members of Congress praised the rules.

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, said the rules showed the folly of efforts to repeal the health care law.

?If Republicans succeed,? Mr. Miller said, ?they will be taking money right out of the pockets of millions of average Americans.?

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Download of the Week: Soluto

Administration to Seek Balance in Airport Screening

Representative John L. Mica, Republican of Florida and a critic of the Obama administration?s new screening methods, says the Transportation Security Administration should look at Israel, which uses early detection techniques at airports. An editorial in The Washington Times last week praised El Al, the Israeli national airline, as employing the ?smarter approach? of using ?sophisticated intelligence analysis which allows them to predict which travelers constitute a possible threat and which do not.?

As it turns out, the security methods employed by Israel?s famous Shin Bet security service at Ben-Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv are frequently stricter and more intrusive than the full-body scanners and pat-downs American officials put into place Nov. 1, said security analysts and the travelers who regularly show up at Ben-Gurion four hours before their flights for screening.

At Ben-Gurion, some passengers have been searched so thoroughly that they have had to walk through the terminals, the gates and up to the doors of their planes with no handbags, wallets or even shoes.

The Israeli approach highlights the difficult balance faced by the Obama administration as it tries to address terror threats without unduly alienating the people it is trying to protect. The Israeli system relies on steps that would be likely to provoke opposition in the United States on civil liberties grounds: collecting detailed information about passengers before they fly. Besides, Israel has only two airports and 50 flights a day, compared with 450 airports and thousands of daily flights in the United States.

The administration argues that by focusing at airports on the search for weapons ? in contrast to the Israelis, who focus in airports on finding terrorists ? the United States is mounting a valuable and necessary last line of defense without undermining civil liberties. The multiethnic population of the United States makes it more difficult here than in Israel to profile possible terrorists, experts say, leaving officials with little choice but to screen passengers carefully for illicit items.

?If you say at the highest level of generality that the American system is looking for weapons and the Israelis are looking for terrorists, obviously we would be better off looking for terrorists, because then we would spare ourselves the silly indignities we imposed on ourselves because of our civil liberties laws,? said Stewart Baker, the author of ?Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren?t Stopping Tomorrow?s Terrorism? and a former official with the Department of Homeland Security. ?But we tried that, tried doing security checks on passengers, and a left-right coalition said, ?You can?t trust the government with this.? ?

Mr. Baker was referring to several proposals for advanced screening that were scrapped during the Bush administration after travel industry and civil liberties groups objected. One plan would have involved checking credit records and criminal histories, along with checking whether passengers were on terrorism watch lists. Based on results, each traveler would have been assigned a risk level. Those deemed dangerous would have been barred from flights.

Critics contended it was an invasion of privacy. The T.S.A. eventually found its way to the screening system it is using now, which searches for weapons instead of relying primarily on profiling people.

On Monday, administration officials said that they would try to iron out the kinks in the system in response to public concerns, but they maintained that the new system would be around as long as there were people seeking to blow up planes. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said the government was ?desperately? trying to balance privacy and security.

The T.S.A. administrator, John S. Pistole, released a public service announcement and video describing the new procedures in advance of the Thanksgiving travel week. Administration officials say that fewer than 3 percent of passengers are receiving pat-downs; people get them if their screening raises an alarm, or if they refuse the body scan.

Representative Mica said that the Israeli model worked because Israeli agents ?try to detect behavior or people?s patterns? by asking them questions. Israeli officials say that any passenger trying to board El Al is subject to questions from security agents.

?Everybody gets asked, who you are, where are you traveling to,? one Israeli official said, speaking on grounds of anonymity because he did not want to speak publicly about the security measures. The agents asking the questions, he said, ?are very well trained.?

?Depending on what you say,? he said, ?they will put you through an additional screening.?

Mr. Baker, the security expert, said: ?Israeli agents focus on the travelers? country of origin, their profession, visas that are stamped in their passports, places they have visited, people they know and the color of their skin. If you say you?re a Renaissance art scholar, they?ll ask you if you know who Titian is.?

Mr. Mica maintained that the Israeli system was not profiling. ?Someone is trained to do it with people who warrant further scrutiny,? he said.

But some travelers say they would rather go through a full body scan than the system at Ben-Gurion airport.

?My experience leaving Tel Aviv was by far and away the most unpleasant encounter I?ve ever had with airport security officials in the decade,? said Matthew Yglesias, a blogger with the Center for American Progress who said it took three hours last month for him to get from the initial security check at Ben-Gurion to the food court. ?As best I could tell, things went pretty smoothly as long as you were Israeli, traveling with an Israeli, or traveling with some kind of well-established tour group.?

Mr. Yglesias was traveling with a group of journalists.

?The African-American woman in our group was taken off to be questioned. A bunch of us were told we couldn?t bring iPads on the plane,? he said. The Jewish member of his group ?had the easiest time,? he said. ?The black woman had the hardest time.?

J. David Goodman contributed reporting from New York.

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Young Adults Take Their Internet On The Go [TNW Mobile]

Opera has published the latest instalment in its State of the Mobile Web report series highlighting the different internet lifestyle choices and attitudes of its Opera Mini users.

Surveying over 300,000 users, Opera has found that a high percentage of its users between ages 18 and 27 are now using their mobile phones to access the internet over traditional devices like a desktop or laptop computer. In Nigeria, South Africa and Indonesia alone, over 90% of users between those ages are are frequently turning to their mobiles over a computer to access the internet.

Opera chose to specifically focus on users of a younger demographic as they happened to account for the main bulk of its Opera Mini userbase, polling users from all over Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa.

In Poland, Germany, the U.S and Brazil, where desktop or laptops were used as the primary means of accessing the internet, it was surprising to learn that they were also the countries where smartphones were among the top handets used. This indicates that users in the more emerging countries are more reliant on their mobile phones for internet access, demonstrated by the fact that more than 9 out of 10 respondents in Nigeria, South Africa and Indonesia acknowledging they would choose their mobile over a traditional computer.

As Opera notes, the findings present a major argument against the suggestion that smartphone adoption would lead to an increase in mobile web usage.

As expected, the U.S leads the way in mobile media sharing with almost 90% of 18-27 year-olds using their phones to share pictures, whereas Vietnam had the lowest use with 67%. The reverse is true for dating via SMS, where only 44% of U.S users have used SMS to ask someone out on a date, compared to 84% of those surveyed from Vietnam.

In October 2010, Opera experienced a 7.1% increase in Opera Mini users from a month previous, up 92% from October 2009. Its users viewed over 41.6 billion pages during that month, generating 616 million MB of data, an increase in data traffic of 134% from the previous month.

The full report can be viewed at http://www.opera.com/smw/.

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