This virtual event gives small business owners the chance to hear directly from procurement officers about opportunities to work with them.
05/29/2025
12:00pm - 1:00pm
Virtual
Join us for an exclusive networking event at the Museum of Fine Arts and enjoy self-guided tours of John Wilson and Van Gogh, showcasing the deep bond of family, friendship, and community.
06/05/2025
5:30pm - 8:30pm
Museum of Fine Arts
The Transportation First Series offers a platform to discuss the challenges faced by our region, with the input of experts and changemakers.
06/12/2025
2:45pm - 4:30pm
Hybrid | Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce
This program is in redevelopment. Click this page for DEI resources.
Our Women’s Leadership Program enables you to take your leadership to the next level by arming you with the most in-demand leadership toolkit.
Our Boston’s Future Leaders (BFL) program provides emerging leaders with a socially conscious and civically engaged leadership toolkit, as well as the opportunity to apply their knowledge through experiential assignments.
Join us on June 12 for a highly interactive virtual workshop with Strategic Career & Leadership Coach Carole-Ann Penney.
City Awake empowers young professionals in a variety of ways that encourages these rising leaders to stay invested in the region’s future success.
We are developing an ecosystem of corporations and partners with the influence and buying power to transform economic inclusion for minority business enterprises (MBEs).
Small businesses are the backbone of the Boston economy. Learn more about the resources available through the Chamber.
BIMA (the Boston Interactive Media Association) serves a vibrant community of like-minded professionals from agencies, brands, publishers, and ad-tech companies with business interests in the New England market.
For over 30 years, the Chamber’s Women’s Network has connected female professionals of all background and career levels. Today, our Women’s Network is the largest in New England, strengthening the professional networks of women each year.
The Massachusetts Apprentice Network convenes employers, training providers, and talent sources interested in developing and implementing apprenticeship programs in occupations across industries and statewide in fields such as tech, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and more.
Explore our mission and values to better understand how we are leading the business community forward.
Our member directory is your resource to discover, connect, and engage with Boston’s businesses from every industry and sector.
Jana’s mission: Improving lives in emerging markets through Internet access
The origin of our Boston-based small business lies in Kenya.
During a sabbatical from MIT, while working as a Fulbright professor in Nairobi, my team of students and I built a new texting platform for the Ministry of Health. Blood banks throughout Kenya were unable to communicate easily about the daily status of the country’s blood supply. The platform we created enabled local nurses to send updates on the blood supply levels in rural hospitals to centralized blood banks across Kenya.
At first, the program was a success, but then we saw that nurses stopped sending the texts with information on blood supply after just two weeks. My team and I realized that while the nurses wanted to use the program to help their patients and locate critical blood supplies, they were being charged personally for the texts, which they could not afford.
To keep the program moving forward, we created software that reimbursed the nurses when they sent texts that communicated to the blood banks. The nurses returned to the program with renewed enthusiasm, which helped them do their jobs more efficiently and ultimately save the lives of many who needed the precious blood.
This discovery sparked the realization that sponsored data can support more smartphone usage and provide a solution to the high cost of data, especially for mobile users in emerging countries. With this in mind, we founded Jana, and launched our mobile app called mCent. Today, there are more than 80 people working for Jana in Boston, which is making a positive impact across the world.
When users in emerging countries open the mCent app, they are presented with sponsored content, specifically mobile apps they can download and use. In exchange, they are reimbursed with data that can be used anywhere on the Internet without restrictions.
Gaining Internet access is life changing for users in emerging markets. For every 10 percent increase in mobile broadband, GDP in emerging markets increases by 1.4 percent and the number of people living on less than $1.25 per day decreases by a third.
Still, the mobile data needed to access the Internet is relatively expensive. Approximately 88 million smartphone users in India— 43 percent of all smartphone users in the country — do not have a data plan because mobile data prices are so relatively high. The demand for mobile data is not going away. By 2020, emerging markets will have over 2.5 billion smartphone users and the demand for Internet access will increase by 500 percent.
We strongly believe that fair and open access to the Internet is a basic human right and crucial to building social and economic systems. Access to the Internet not only increases opportunities for education and communication, it can also save lives as in the case with nurses in Kenya texting about precious blood supplies. Our goal at Jana is to meet a real need in the world by using our knowledge of innovative, cutting-edge technology. We are focused on reaching a billion people over the next five years to help them break down the financial barrier to full Internet connection.
With this vision of empowering a billion individuals through access to the Internet before us, we named our company Jana, which in Sanskrit means “people.”
This post is a part of a series of posts written by Small Business of the Year honorees. Stay tuned for more insights from our honorees leading up to the October 6th event.
This post was written by Nathan Eagle, Co-founder and CEO of Jana.
Popular Resources