TC50: CrowdFlower Crowdsources Mundane Labor To The Cloud

Direct link:<p><a href="http://crowdflower.com/" rel="nofollow">http://crowdflower.com/</a><p>Their quality control could eliminate the quasi-quality control that I now perform with MTurk. I set up a task like "get bio from webpage" and send it to 3 unique workers. I then run the results through a script to check whether they agree. If they do, accept all (pick random one). If they don't agree hand check (!) and possibly reject one of the jobs.

IMHO a lot of tasks that they talked about seem to be be repetitive, large-scale tasks that already can be broken into small pieces. For instance the sentiment analysis demo (each tweet is a task) or image moderation (each image is a task).

<i>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.</i><p>How do they break tasks down into individual units? That seems like a tough thing to automate, so they may have a bottleneck there when they try to scale. On the other hand, they could have an upsell opportunity if they can sell people by handling more complex tasks that a "virtual project manager" would break down for them.

I think its a brilliant concept. I think there is a huge market for mundane jobs and no specialized place to go for. Guru, elance, odesk are all for project work. Amazon turks is too spread out. They actually have found out a niche, now it is just going to be about implementing it. I will definitely be giving these guys a try.

I'd use them, mturk is a pain to use directly if you're outside the US.

How is this different from amazon mechanical turk?