MoneyBee: Towards enabling a ubiquitous, efficient, and easy-to-use mobile crowdsourcing service in the emerging market

We present a mobile crowdsourcing platform called MoneyBee that is accessible to mobile phone users in emerging markets through their mobile operators. The operator has a large subscriber base and the ability to pay task workers using prepaid airtime minutes. These advantages allow MoneyBee to reach far more people than conventional Internet crowdsourcing approaches. The mobile operator already has access to information on user demographics, location and presence, and monthly spending patterns. In addition, the MoneyBee platform gathers user information (such as preferences, skills, and reliability) from a user's interaction with the crowdsourcing service. Using this data to intelligently assign crowd-sourcing tasks to relevant workers is a challenging problem. Similarly, efficient dispatching of tasks to minimize the network load on the operator network is equally important. Further, simple interfaces (including speech) are needed to submit as well as execute crowdsourcing tasks on the mobile device. We describe initial solutions to some of these challenges in this paper.