Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

Mosoko or mobile “soko” (for local market in Swahili) is a text message and voice based “online” market place, “Craiglist for the next billion.”  The system is a launchpad for research into providing a way to interface with the internet through mobile phones.

Entrepreneurial Programming and Resarch on Mobiles (EPROM) at MIT works on education, research and entrepreneurship for mobile phone programming in East Africa.

In education, they have developed a variety of courses in mobile phone programming which are being taught in a variety of East African universities.  They are training programmers and comuter scientists to generate localy useful mobile phone applications.

In research, students are developing applications that can be run from any GSM SIM card and can be used for medical data collection in the field, amongst others.

In entrepreneurship, the group runs a SMS bootcamp teaching how to launch SMS-based services and supports small mobile phone application-based services such as MoSoko, a SMS based Craigslist, and Airtime Banking, which transfers a certain amount of credit over a desired amount of time.