Opportunity with MSR and their emerging markets group: Search Labs (http://research.microsoft.com/searchlabs) is a group within Microsoft Research, whose primary focus is on improving the quality of web search and developing search-driven applications. We plan to have a summer internship project on how to use mobile platform for enabling a marketplace amongst the economically disadvantaged (description below). We are also open to exploring the use of mobile platform for education or healthcare. Interested candidates should contact Krishnaram Kenthapadi (krishnaram.kenthapadi@microsoft.com) at the earliest. Marketplace for the Long Tail: Providing Goods and Services for the Economically Disadvantaged using Mobile Platform The goal of this project is to build a platform for the exchange of goods and services amongst the poor. Given the rapid growth and the large reduction in the cost of mobile phones and services, mobile phones can soon become economically feasible for the poor to afford and hence we would like our platform to be mobile-based. We would like to focus on goods and services that are produced as well as consumed by the poor as these represent a market segment that is underserved today. It is desirable for our platform to support self-help groups and new payment mechanisms. We would like to ground the project by validating our concepts and ideas through interactions with economically disadvantaged in the bay area. We would also explore collaborations with local universities such as Stanford and Berkeley and mobile-focused divisions in Microsoft such as TellMe.