Amazon’s developed an extremely clever–but kinda strange–interface to match humans with little mundance tasks they say machines can’t do. Called Mechanical Turk, the service asks you to sign up and then get paid–pennies, mostly–to do all sorts of things, like correct A9 mapping photos.
A typical task right now is for A9 and reads as follows:
“You are presented with the name and address of a business as well as a set of photos taken along the street where the business is supposed to be located. Your task is to identify the best photo of the business that is listed.”
For that, you get .03; if you do it 179 times, you get 5.37.
Amazon’s estimates work so that if you have spent an hour to fulfill 1170 of these requests, you get $35.00, which means your time is worth $35 an hour if you can fulfill about 1 per second–if it takes you 5 seconds to fulfull each task, your time is only worth $6-7.00.
Amazon says that they take a slice of each transaction and that workers can transferr money to their U.S. personal bank account or to their Amazon.com account.
The most amazing thing about this, IMHO, is that the Amazon guys let the Web Services team put this up–which means they had to run some use case scenarios on what it would save them in terms of hiring freelancers or outsourcing company wide.
Yeesh.
Amazon’s developed an extremely clever–but kinda strange–interface to match humans with little mundance tasks they say machines can’t do. Called Mechanical Turk, the service asks you to sign up and then get paid–pennies, mostly–to do all sorts of things, like correct A9 mapping photos.
A typical task right now is for A9 and reads as follows:
“You are presented with the name and address of a business as well as a set of photos taken along the street where the business is supposed to be located. Your task is to identify the best photo of the business that is listed.”
For that, you get .03; if you do it 179 times, you get 5.37.
Amazon’s estimates work so that if you have spent an hour to fulfill 1170 of these requests, you get $35.00, which means your time is worth $35 an hour if you can fulfill about 1 per second–if it takes you 5 seconds to fulfull each task, your time is only worth $6-7.00.
Amazon says that they take a slice of each transaction and that workers can transferr money to their U.S. personal bank account or to their Amazon.com account.
The most amazing thing about this, IMHO, is that the Amazon guys let the Web Services team put this up–which means they had to run some use case scenarios on what it would save them in terms of hiring freelancers or outsourcing company wide.
Yeesh.