CrowdFlower is here to take the inane tasks in your life, and crowdsource it in real time to “thousands of people.” Have too many spam comments, just have CrowdFlower go through and handle all of them for you. They claim to have up to 99% accuracy because they use human labor. Now, it does seem to me, to be more or less like MechanicalTurk.
Lo and behold, they in fact use MT, and other sources of cheap labor. Pulling from the cheap labor pools of the world, on a pay per action basis, you can quickly burn through an annoying task list and get to the bar. CrowdFlower goes through and finds the better laborers and brings them to you, to avoid getting stuck with spammers and hacks.
CrowdFlower is going to take all of the “awesome things about software as a service, and apply them to labor.” Quite a bold claim. Our only fear is that it might be too hard to set up the tasks, but that remains to be seen. Also, judges at the TechCrunch50 brought out fears that if Amazon wanted to move up the foodchain, they might quickly consumer CrowdFlower, or perhaps pull their access to MT workers.
CrowdFlower will be monetizing by taking a small commision on each transaction that moves through the system. CrowdFlower is a part of Delores Labs, which some of the judges had heard of.
