For any business, from a startup to a large company, mundane, yet time-intensive tasks like transcribing video or removing spam comments from blogs, can be a waste of employee time. TechCrunch50 startup CrowdFlower CrowdFlower provides Labor as a Service (LaaS) by letting clients access an always-on, scalable workforce.
Unlike traditional methods of outsourcing and hiring, CrowdFlower’s web offering lets businesses instantly access thousands of workers without picking up the phone. Here’s how it works. If a company has a transcribing task, the administrator can fill out a task form on CrowdFlower. Once all the fields are filled out, CrowdFlower will price the task based on the amount of time it takes to perform the assignment per unit (the user does the sample task). The startup will break the task into units that can be performed by a single person and price the task accordingly.
CloudFlower then lets you choose the channels of work. You can pick Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, their labor force or even a Facebook application where people perform task to earn virtual currencies. The system trusts a worker less based on the mistakes a worker makes. Once the task is finished, CloudFlower will perform a quality control check and show the user the results of the task. The startup will indicate which workers were most productive and accurate. CrowdFlower will continue to employ workers who have high ratings.
CrowdFlower monetizes its platform by taking a commission on every task created by customers.
Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)
The experts: Satish Dharmaraj, Lior Zorea, Bradley Horowitz, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Rose
SD: I think it’s interesting-will you do transcribing of voicemails to text etc. Probably want to think about a vertical?
A: I think there a lot of tasks that are boring that people don’t outsource.
LZ: I think this a big idea. How do you keep a competitive advantage?
A: We already have a huge history of workers and we know who can do which tasks well. We have people who can do 99% accuracy on mundane tasks.
BH: A lot of stuff you are doing is possible on Mechanical Turk. Is this where they will go?
A: Here’s the tough thing for mechanical turk-they don’t want to know what the results are. We have a higher level of semantics when we do a task, we have higher level of quality control. Amazon may see this as a application on top of a platform.
TO: How big is the niche here? There’s still a lot of ignorance about this?
A: There are a lot of interesting enterprise tasks that can be done. For example, MySpace. There are challenges like security and integration. But the biggest challenge is quality.
We don’t know how we are going to reach small customers.
KR: Service is awesome but need to figure out how you are going to get the message out there.
Images:
Video:
Other Coverage:
TC50: CrowdFlower offers rich analytics for mechanical turks VentureBeat.
TC50: CrowdFlower offers rich analytics for mechanical turks caem.la.
CrowdFlower Bolsters a New Era of Work PR Web.
brilliant idea, brilliant implementation and an excellent presentation. Definitely a contester for the win, they’ve done everything right.
Fail. This idea is DOA. VC must be pretty desperate if they are throwing money at crap like this.
Trascribing video sounds very interesting
Well done gents, presentation and product were well executed.
+10
Interesting concept, but tough space given that even the Mechanical Turk market is very small.
Maybe MT isn’t leveraging “the crowd” in the right ways, or maybe it isn’t doing a good job of pushing its platform out there – will interested to see where these guys take it!
Fantastic idea. We use Turk a lot and better layers on top of it is something that we would benefit from (as I’m guessing a lot of others would as well).
Very cool ap.
Does the price go down if you elect to use a pool of people that are not getting paid?
How much control do you have to limit who can contribute on the task based their previous performance for similar tasks?
If my task was to characterize tweets, how many people look and characterize the same tweet to ensure accuracy and to evaluate the others that have also typed the tweet? Can this “number of reviews” metric be set by the person setting up the job?
The image is awesome! That dude makes me think “Let’s Get Tropical!!”
http://letsgettropical.com/ (nice work, brian)
Good job. I used MechTurk a lot in the past and it could definitely use a better interface on top of it.
But here also lies the problem – this seems as not much more than a layer on top of MechTurk. If you’re successful, Amazon can just copy whatever you did (kind of like Facebook and FriendFeed).
become more and more strong.
Labor as a Service is actually a model that is really grabbing hold. CrowdFlower is not the only company that does this — a few different products are cropping up, each with their own angle on LaaS. My article on LaaS, its applicants and its future: http://blog.opt...-service-model/