Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later moved to Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in "society and genetics". You can contact him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (it has other addresses too, so don't worry if you have another). ? Read More
If you regularly have to deal with large amounts of duplicate data or to sort, there's a good chance you are familiar with services like Amazon Mechanical Turk. The promise is appealing: you can hire employees to perform basic tasks to the relatively small amount of money. And, in theory, everyone wins. You get your tasks completed on the cheap, and outsourcing specialists get to make some extra income from the comfort of their computers.
Unfortunately things a bit more complicated than that. Coordination of these jobs require little effort to ensure that you are getting quality results — you must select the employee to find out what price set and so on — and it's not always easy for beginners to get started. And then there's concern that the Mechanical Turk workers not getting paid enough.
Y Combinator funded start-up now called MobileWorks wants to be an alternative to the Mechanical Turk is as easy to use, to the extent possible, with no practical management, after the task. In fact, MobileWorks promising is a service that is so non-intervention, that developers can use it as a kind of API you do query data, and the "human" is returned, with no intermediate steps. And they're promising to pay its workers better than they are on Amazon.
Of course, the Mechanical Turk and similar services require practical attention because: you are dealing with real people, many of whom are untrained, and besides their modest payment they are not especially strong stimulus to the work of the highest quality.
MobileWorks knows this, but he believes that there is a better solution than micromanagement. The company has formulated for the establishment of labour force consists exclusively of workers producing consistently good results that users don't have to worry about the management of their tasks.
MobileWorks first got his start in January, when she set out to start the service for crowd sourcing tasks that will be completed solely on mobile devices (in other words, people will enter data from their mobile phones). The company began approaching mobile retail in India, asking them to identify and recruit clients who may be good candidates. Retailer incentive? Everyone wants to be MobileWorks employee would need a mobile data plan.
Team MobileWorks said that it worked well to fill its workforce with high quality work, but that since it is recognized that there are tasks that are better suited for the completion of work on a computer, so he's letting employees use computers, and it is also giving its original workforce organically to recruit their friends and family (they say that these workers have an incentive to provide people withthey are recruited as solid worker). The force is now up to about 150, mainly in India and Pakistan.
With regard to wages MobileWorks said that most of its employees were earning less than $ 2/day prior to service, and that after 2-3 hours a day, they earn $ 4/day.
Another key factor in ensuring the quality, said MobileWorks is that most of these tasks manually fall in one of the 20 or so buckets. Thus the company is doing its utmost to optimize around these general objectives (which currently includes scraping and form entries), making easier both to objectives and for workers to complete them. And the team said he has algorithms to ensure quality.
MobileWorks has a very high bar for yourself — if users have noticed that some of their work returns with crappy results, they will quickly learn to trust this non-interference. And quality control services will not really until he starts reaching scale (becomes much more difficult to ensure the high quality of work, when you employ thousands of workers, instead of 150). But surely there is room for improvement in this space, and if they nail it, great market potential.
We will keep an eye on MobileWorks in progress going forward.
MobileWorks is a Crowdsourcing platform for business and developers is more accurate, faster and without effort than any existing solution. Do complex Web research, tagging the images or convert ...
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