mobile marketplace
Posted by CorinneRamey on Apr 28, 2008
Imagine you're in Bangladesh and you want to buy a cow. You pull your mobile phone out of your pocket and start sending text messages to 3838, the shortcode for CellBazaar, a mobile phone marketplace which some have called the "Craigslist of Bangladesh." You look through the relevant ads and look at the ages, locations, and number of teeth of the 187 cows that are currently for sale. After another SMS, you are connected with the phone number of the the seller, ready to make your new purchase. What could have taken days to coordinate was made easy by a series of simple text messages.
Kamal Quadir, the founder of CellBazaar, sat down with MobileActive for an interview. Quadir said that he first got the idea for CellBazaar when he was a graduate student at MIT. "I was surrounded by technologically sophisticated people," said Quadir, who is originally from Bangladesh.
