Mobile phone service connects buyers, sellers

Here at the Aspen Institute one of the folks I’ve spent a lot of time with is Kamal Quadir from Bangladesh, founder of Cellbazaar. As Textually put it:

Bangladesh’s top mobile phone operator GrameenPhone, and USA-based CellBazaar have introduced a service connecting buyers and sellers in an electronic marketplace over the mobile phone.

“It’s like a more direct, more primitive e-Bay, a phone-based equivalent of newspaper classified advertisements. The concept was developed at the MIT Media Lab.

The service will enable sellers to list details of their products, produce or even services in a database while buyers can look for any of this information through SMS. It will not handle transactions, but will simply put buyers and sellers in contact with each other via mobile phone.

Kamal has described it as a sort of Craigslist for the developing world, where millions of people in Bangladesh, for example, are using mobile phones to cut out the middleman who rips off farmers and merchants and thereby benefit both buyers and sellers.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.