A Business Essay in the New York Times describes a project in which “Reuters has dispatched about 60 market reporters to the region to report on the going price for, say, oranges or onions, and to package the data into a text message that is sent to subscribers.” The mobile phone is being tried out as the basis for delivering market information power to and from remote locations:

WHETHER it’s for an Armani-suited Wall Street trader or a farmer in rural India, the right information at the right time is a baseline for success.

For 157 years, since signing a contract in 1851 to supply stock prices from exchanges in Continental Europe to the London Stock Exchange, Reuters has served up numbers to the finance set.

Now, Reuters is trying to provide analogous services to farmers in the developing world, where price information is stubbornly hard to compare. If successful, the program could become a model for economists and international agencies that have long proselytized for the use of technology — in particular, the mobile phone — to burnish economic growth in places like India and sub-Saharan Africa . . . .

A Business Essay in the New York Times describes a project in which “Reuters has dispatched about 60 market reporters to the region to report on the going price for, say, oranges or onions, and to package the data into a text message that is sent to subscribers.” The mobile phone is being tried out [...]