REALLY small tasks - crowdsourcing for mobile users

Read a great article this morning that reminded me about an idea I had awhile back to bring Mechanical Turk to the iPhone. It looks like the txteagle group is already thinking along these lines.

From the article in Technology Review (Crowd-Sourcing the World):

Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, is launching a project similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk but that distributes tasks via cell phones. The goal of his project, called txteagle, is to leverage an underused work force in some of the poorest parts of the world.

Amazing stuff. People in developing countries can use their cell phones and make as much as $3/hour. Tasks include transcription, journalism, localization, surveys and more. And I thought the small task outsourcing on sites like SerebraConnect were small!