Tag Archives: outsourcing personal tasks
From millions of tasks to thousands of jobs: Bringing digital work to the developing world
February 1, 2012… old occupations.
For example, hundreds of thousands of people around the world earn income from tasks like moderating images posted by users to an online community, categorizing products on an e-commerce site, and transcribing digital video clips to make them more searchable. Because these tasks are completely digital, they can be physically carried out anywhere where a computer can be connected to the Internet.
A recent trend is that demand for such digital blue-collar work is satisfied …
Faces in the crowd
April 29, 2010Share
Once upon a time, consumption was personal. Although international trade has existed for millennia, until relatively recently it was not a big part of life. People grew their own vegetables and bought goods made by the local butcher, baker and candlestick maker. Selection was terrible, but at least everything you consumed supported a friendly face.
In the modern world, trade and the outsourcing of jobs to other countries is an …
Distributed work and data security: can the crowd keep a secret?
May 23, 2011… as play. Even the most innocent, open, non-evil companies generally have some data – such as personal information, research and development strategy, secret Santa lists – they need to keep secure.
Distributed work platforms face a unique and particularly knotty data security dilemma. If your business model relies on distributing client data among a vast (often anonymous) crowd of strangers, how do you make sure that any confidential information stays on the QT?
Crowd control
Six …
Lost in the Virtual Economy? Here’s a map
April 7, 2011… According to Lehdonvirta and Ernkvist, they are in fact distinct: Crowdsourcing entails outsourcing tasks traditionally performed by employees or contractors to a large group of people through the internet. Microwork on the other hand tends to involve breaking the work down to suitably sized microtasks, integrating quality assurance into the process, and recombining the completed microtasks into a final deliverable. This is a view that we certainly share, and a good reminder of how …
Amazon Mechanical Turk, crowd, crowdsourcing, gamesourcing, microtask, microwork, National Library of Finland, Optical character recognition, University of Tokyo, Ville Miettinen, virtual economies, virtual economy, virtual item, work | 3 CommentsSmartsheet: the deadliest app in town?
January 20, 2011… successful, it spawns a whole new industry.
When people talk about the history of personal computing the spotlight tends to focus on advances in hardware. But while shiny new technology is always impressive, it’s software that’s made PCs popular, and made money. In the 1980s, the business world only became interested in the cutting edge Apple II once killer app VisiCalc – the first graphical spreadsheet – came along. The internet was a tiny network, populated by a …
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