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The idea for txteagle originated in the Kilifi local district hospital on the coast of Kenya, where co-founder and CEO Nathan Eagle lived and worked in 2006 and 2007.
The village of Kilifi sits between the cities of Mombasa and Malindi on one of Kenya’s major thoroughfares – a road where a significant number of serious traffic accidents occur every year. The Kilifi local district hospital provides emergency support to the victims of these accidents. This regularly depletes the small hospital’s blood supplies. Messages periodically circulate around the hospital seeking volunteer donors of a specific blood type; hospital staff become emergency blood donors far more often than is preferable. The lack of direct communication between the rural hospitals and the officials in Kenya’s central blood banks exacerbated this situation, artificially creating blood shortages in Kilifi even as the central blood bank was fully supplied.
Together with University of Nairobi research assistant Eric Magutu, Nathan developed an SMS (Short Message Service) server application that enabled nurses in the hospital to send via text message information on current blood supply levels to officials in the centralized blood bank. The goal was to allow officials to recognize an upcoming shortage before rural supplies were fully depleted. Nurses tasked with sending blood level information, however, were reluctant to use their personal airtime to send updates. The initial introduction of the SMS system had little impact.
In the summer of 2007, Nathan’s team made a slight modification to the SMS Bloodbank system: upon receiving a properly formatted SMS message with the day’s blood supplies, the system would automatically transfer a small amount of airtime back to the nurse sending the information. The system became a success.
The automatic compensation system led Nathan to consider other types of work that can be completed on extremely low-end phones. He then partnered with co-founder and CTO Ben Olding to create the statistical machinery which allows our system to automatically evaluate the value of submitted work. Combining the idea of using phones to send simple tasks to individuals in the developing world with the creation of the “Accuracy Inference Engine,” txteagle was born.