Nathan Eagle

Nathan Eagle is an American technology executive. He is best known as the CEO and co-founder of Jana (formerly txteagle), a company that subsidizes mobile internet access in emerging markets.[1][2] He has also served as a professor at both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[3][4]

Nathan Eagle
Nathan Eagle delivering the closing plenary to the 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos
Born (1976-12-30) December 30, 1976
California
NationalityAmerican
Alma materStanford and MIT
OccupationTechnology executive
Spouse(s)Beth Altringer, div.
Caroline Buckee

Education

Eagle received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 1999 before moving to Nepal to develop hydroelectric power generation technology as a Fulbright scholar.[5] Between 2001 to 2005 he received two master’s degrees from Stanford in Electrical Engineering and Management Science and Engineering, and a PhD from MIT, pioneering the use of Artificial Intelligence to predict human behavior from mobile phone data. [4] [6]

Career

Early Academic Work

In his doctoral research, he gave 100 volunteers from the MIT community smartphones that logged their activity over the 2004-05 academic year, creating a dataset of more than 350,000 hours of communication, proximity, location and activity information.[7] According to Wired Magazine, “Eagle's algorithms were able to predict what people -- especially professors and Media Lab employees -- would do next and be right up to 85 percent of the time.”[8] This work illustrated how mobile phones can be used to collect accurate, large-scale data about real social interactions.[6] The data has been analyzed in hundreds of academic publications[9] and the research was named one of the "10 Technologies Most Likely To Change The Way We Live" by the MIT Technology Review.[10]

As a research scientist at MIT and Fulbright Professor at the University of Nairobi in 2006, Eagle developed a mobile phone programming curriculum that has been adopted by twelve Sub-Saharan computer science departments, leading to hundreds of mobile applications.[11][12]

As a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in 2010, he and Eric Horvitz launched an initiative called Artificial Intelligence for Development.[13] This initiative led to a diverse set of projects ranging from computational models of food shortages to studies on the dynamics of slums.[14]

As an adjunct assistant professor at Harvard University in 2011, he formed the Engineering Social Systems group, with researchers in fields ranging from epidemiology and public health to statistical physics and urban planning, dedicated to the analysis of large scale data for social purposes.[15]

Eagle has authored 8 patents and over 100 peer reviewed publications in journals including Science and Nature, accumulating more than 10,000 citations. [16][17] Eagle’s book from MIT Press, Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World, won the 2015 American Publishers PROSE Award.[18][19]

txteagle / Jana

Based on his work while living in East Africa, Eagle co-founded txteagle with Benjamin Olding in 2009 from the conviction that “mobile phones not only provide a mechanism for global communication, they also allow for global compensation”.[20] The service originally enabled people in emerging markets to earn small amounts of money by completing simple tasks for organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank.[21][22] These tasks expanded to include market research surveys for FMCG companies including Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Johnson & Johnson, as well as the news organizations CNN and Al Jazeera. [23] txteagle rebranded as “Jana” in 2011.[24]

Eagle led Jana to profitability in 2015,[12] in large part due to partnerships with technology companies including Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Amazon. [25][26] Eagle subsequently raised an additional $57 million round of funding led by Verizon, with Tim Armstrong joining the advisory board, expanding Jana's service to 90 countries though partnerships with 311 mobile operators.[27][28][29] By 2017, Jana was regularly providing up to 70 megabytes of free data per day to 40 million people.[30][31] By 2019, 75 million people had used Jana's products to gain affordable access to the internet. [4]

Eagle became a vocal advocate of net neutrality and Jana’s social mission to provide unrestricted internet access for a billion people.[32][33][34] He often emphasized that if Jana succeeds in redirecting 30% of the $200 billion spent on advertising in the developing world into subsidies for mobile internet, that would be the equivalent of giving one billion people a 5% raise.[35][22]

Eagle began to take an interest in the life sciences and joined the Longevity Fund as a Limited Partner in 2017. By 2019, after 12 years as CEO and raising nearly $100 million, Eagle stepped down from Jana to pursue entrepreneurial interests in synthetic biology and the biopharmaceutical industry full-time. [4]

Awards and recognition

References
  1. Langkjaer-Bain, Robert (2011-09-28). "Mobile tech firm txteagle becomes Jana". ResearchLive. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  2. "Mobile work: A way to earn money by texting". The Economist. 2010-10-28. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  3. "HSPH's Nathan Eagle awarded prestigious economics prize". Harvard School of Public Health. 2012-06-19. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  4. "Nathan Eagle at the MIT Media Lab". MIT. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  5. Strauss, Robert. "Ready for Takeoff". Stanford Magazine. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  6. Kwok, Roberta (2009-04-22). "Personal technology: Phoning in data". Nature. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  7. "Reality Mining". MIT Media Laboratory. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  8. Singel, Ryan (2005-07-25). "When Cell Phones Become Oracles". Wired. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  9. "Reality Mining downloads". Retrieved 2020-04-13.
  10. "The 10 Emerging Technologies of 2008". MIT Technology Review. 2008-02-19. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  11. "Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles". MIT. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  12. Olson, Parmy (2015-09-25). "Nathan Eagle: Megabyte mogul". Forbes. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  13. "Artificial Intelligence for Development". Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  14. Hotz, Robert Lee (2011-04-23). "The Really Smart Phone". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  15. "Harvard Engineering Social Systems group". Harvard University. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  16. "Nathan Eagle's Publications". Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  17. "Nathan Eagle's Patents". Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  18. "Nathan Eagle at MIT Press". MIT Press. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  19. "2015 PROSE Awards". Association of American Publishers. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  20. "Interview with Nathan Eagle, CEO, txteagle Inc". The Guardian. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  21. Marwaha, Alka (2009-02-11). "New service is all in a day's SMS". BBC World Service. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  22. Caulderwood, Kathleen (2014-04-04). "Cheap Phones, Big Data And Good Business". The International Business Times. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  23. Vega, Tanzina (2013-07-15). "Eye on Emerging Markets, Firm Invests in Start-Up". The New York Times. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  24. Roettgers, Janko (2011-09-29). "Jana's quest to redistribute mobile wealth". GigaOm. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  25. Schiff, Allison (2016-03-16). "Advertising Could Be The Key To Unlocking Emerging Markets". AdExchanger. Retrieved 2016-12-01.
  26. Olson, Parmy. "This App Is Cashing In On Giving The World Free Data". Forbes. Retrieved 2016-12-01.
  27. Konrad, Alex (2016-02-18). "Jana Nabs $57 Million And AOL's Tim Armstrong To Bring Free Internet To China". Forbes. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  28. Bergen, Mark (2016-02-18). "Verizon's Venture Arm Backs Mobile Startup Jana, AOL's Tim Armstrong Joins Advisory Board". Recode. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  29. Primack, Dan (2016-02-18). "Jana Raises $57 Million to Bring Internet to Developing World". Fortune. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  30. Peters, Adele (2017-11-21). "This Company Brings Free Mobile Internet To 40 Million People Globally". Fast Company. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  31. Mims, Christopher (2017-04-12). "Web Browsers, Not Apps, Are Internet Gatekeepers for the 'Next Billion'". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  32. Kuchler, Hannah (2015-08-24). "Start-up trumps Facebook in connecting EM customers to internet". The Financial Times. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  33. Vijayakumar, Sanjay (2015-05-08). "Jana is in full support of net neutrality". The Hindu. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  34. Eagle, Nathan (2015-06-01). "How To Make The Internet Free In Developing Countries". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  35. Mims, Christopher (2012-10-02). "The World's Largest Payment Platform Can Reach 2 Billion People". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2020-04-22.
  36. "Technology Pioneers 2014" (PDF). World Economic Forum. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  37. "Ad Age's 40 under 40". Ad Age. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  38. "Krakauer, Eagle among Wired's '50 people who will change the world'". The Santa Fe Institute. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  39. "Past Winners of the President's Medal". Market Research Society. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
  40. "Nathan Eagle". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
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