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New services, APIs are drawing a crowd


By Alex Handy
October 1, 2009 — 
It's an alluring premise: buzzword-turned-reality “crowdsourcing” is the act of passing busywork onto a nebulous cloud of humanity. In large part, the crowdsourcing movement has been held up by the lack of business tasks suitable to practice, but as the Web expands and crowdsourcing companies produce APIs, these barriers are starting to disintegrate.

A December 2008 report from Gil Yehuda and Chris Townsend of Forrester Research suggest that it is time for businesses to consider crowdsourcing in future plans. The report, entitled “Enterprise Innovation Needs a Game Plan,” suggests that businesses can use the Web to harvest new ideas like a bumper crop of distributed brainstorming.

While companies like Dell and Starbucks use crowds for feedback, Netflix used crowds to design a better recommendation algorithm for its users. There, crowds contributed code to offer up movies users might like based on their previous picks. In mid-September, the company awarded a cash prize of US$1 million to a group of scientists and engineers, and claimed it had gained more than $10 million in what it learned from the effort to find the algorithm. Netflix gained a critical new business feature that required little software engineering on its part.

Others companies have already staked a tangible business claim in crowdsourcing. InnoCentive, TopCoder and others use the crowdsourcing approach for software engineering.

A company called LiveOps Inc. offers distributed call centers built from crowds of people in their own homes. Software Q/A startup uTest offers similar services around testing software: testers on demand, as it were.

Those services are maturing along with the businesses that require them. To realize the futuristic dream of integrating a mass of unaffiliated work-from-home temps into any project at any time, crowdsourcing services will require some pretty robust APIs, and managers will have to rethink how work is distributed to employees.

Eckart Walther, senior vice president of Marketplace at LiveOps, said that there are companies that have already figured out where crowdsourcing can help them.

“When Pizza Hut gets busy, we have over 20,000 independent contractors," he said. "They bid for these phone calls, people answer the phone, take the order, type it in and things are done. When Katrina hit, the Red Cross used us to set up a call center. They set up a center in three hours for 300 persons."

Walther said that LiveOps introduced its first APIs in September, and that they were the first step on a road to enterprise-ready programmably accessible crowds. For now, however, tasks already in the system can be monitored remotely, allowing LiveOps tasks to be monitored from remote workflow management solutions.

Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower, said that repetitive tasks are actually better performed by crowds than by small pools of full-time workers. CrowdFlower provides refined instruction and task-creation interfaces for services like Amazon Mechanical Turk and LiveOps' new work distribution system, LiveWork.

LiveWork allows specific tasks to be farmed to crowds. Typically, these tasks are along the lines of “read these comments to detect spam” or “pick the photo that is red.” But in the future, there's no reason those tasks can't turn into “process this expense report” or “balance our budget.”

“The surprising thing is workers like this model better," said Biewald. "When you can go in and start working two minutes later, workers like this. Call centers will change their call scripts to keep people engaged and interested. This is similar. It's keeping your brain from going crazy with these repetitive tasks.

"Social networks hire people to sit there all day and label things as porn or not. Can you imagine if that were your job? That would be horrifying. But imagine doing that for five minutes? That's fun!”


Related Search Term(s): crowdsourcing, LiveOps


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