Armed with smartphones, Colombians are taking on the local mozzies
Jul 6th 2019IF YOU SEE a pothole, smell gas or step in water from a burst main, you can report the details online immediately. Smartphones mean that any concerned citizen can help keep a city’s infrastructure in proper repair—in theory. In practice, a nudge is sometimes required. And in the case of a project organised by Premise, a company in San Francisco that analyses geographical data, that nudge is financial.Premise, a recently formed firm, plans to make money by recruiting millions of observers. It will pay them each a fee to use their smartphones to gather whatever information is of interest to its customers about whichever country the observer happens to be in. The firm is now testing the idea with the Zika Citizen Network, a project that aims to find and stamp out mosquito-breeding sites in Colombia.Choose us for news analysis that respects your time and intelligenceSubscribe to The EconomistWe filter out the noise of the daily news cycle and analyse the trends that matterWe give you rigorous, deeply researched and fact-checked journalism. That’s why Americans named us their most trusted news source in 2017Available wherever you are—in print, digital and, uniquely, in audio, fully narrated by professional broadcastersThis website adheres to all nine of NewsGuard‘s standards of credibility and transparency.ORContinue reading this articleRegister with an email address