MobileWorks

The multi-billion dollar outsourcing market creates new job opportunities for hundreds of thousands of Indian workers who receive a college education and have a middle-class background. However, a large proportion of India's less privileged population has been untapped, missing an enormous opportunity for companies to operate more efficiently while providing job opportunities to people in need.

MobileWorks bridges this gap by utilizing the massive rise in mobile phone usage in India. We provide a simple outsourcing solution that is more cost efficient, scalable, and accurate than existing solutions.  For workers, MobileWorks is an employment opportunity that gives underemployed individuals living on less than $2 per day the ability to earn a supplemental income by completing simple data entry tasks on their mobile device. For clients, MobileWorks is an easier, more accurate, and more cost efficient process to complete this work.

The MobileWorks team consists of four UC Berkeley students and a Ph.D. The team brings significant experiences from international development (Sierra Leone), Indian outsourcing industry (Infosys), telecommunication industry (Vodafone, AT&T), mobile development (Simbian, Android etc), entrepreneurship and sales. The team is supported by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Varun Khurana and ICT for Development expert Tapan Parikh and received an initial funding of $4.000 to finance a pilot that will be carried out in India in February 2011.

MobileWorks charges clients for transcription tasks that have been submitted to MobileWorks on a contract basis, splitting revenues between worker compensation and our own requirements for program expenses and profit. We charge a portion of each dollar paid out to workers as compensation for arranging the transaction, bandwidth expenses, overheads associated with mobile payments & marketing, and subsidizing data plan expenses for workers.

MobileWorks sources tasks from global companies, handles the payment to workers, and guarantees accuracy to clients. We maintain a dual bottom line, offering high-quality digitization and transcription at lower than industry rates while empowering a historically disenfranchised yet willing-and-able workforce. By eliminating the overhead traditionally associated with brick-and-mortar outsourcing operations, MobileWorks is able to pass along a significantly higher wage for data entry tasks, bringing fair trade principles to the practice of outsourcing.