People are not cookies: Nathan Eagle at TEDxEast

Nathan Eagle is the co-founder and CEO of Jana, a company that helps global brands connect directly with people in emerging growth markets via mobile phones. Jana rewards consumers with mobile airtime in return for taking market research surveys and trying out new products. Jana's mobile airtime rewards platform has been integrated into the back-end systems of hundreds of mobile operators, enabling the instant monetary compensation of billions of consumers in 70 local currencies. In addition to being CEO of Jana, Eagle is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Harvard University. His research involves engineering computational tools, designed to explore how the petabytes of data generated about human movements, financial transactions, and communication patterns can be used for social good. In 2012, Wired named Eagle one of the '50 people who will change the world' and the Market Research Society awarded him the President's Medal. Eagle has been elected to MIT's TR35, a group of the world's top innovators under 35, and currently serves on the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council for Data Driven Development. In recognition of his work with the World Bank on mobile crowdsourcing, Eagle was awarded the prestigious Kiel Global Economy Prize alongside Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Martti Ahtisaari. Eagle holds a BS and two MS degrees from Stanford's School of Engineering; his PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory founded the field of 'Reality Mining' and was declared one of the '10 technologies most likely to change the way we live'. His book, "Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer Social Good" will be published later this year by MIT Press.