Cloud Computing: How startup Alegion aims to humanize crowdsourcing
December 12, 2012
Crowdsourcing is a great idea in theory, but it hasn’t really lived up to its potential, says Alegion CEO Nathaniel Gates. He thinks with some fundamental tweaks, Alegion can change all that for the better. There’s man and there’s machine. And then there’s Alegion. The Mill Creek, Wash.-based startup launched at Amazon Web Services’ Re: Invent conference in late November with a business model that aims to turn crowdsourcing labor into the perfect blend of human-machine interaction.
Crowdsourcing hasn’t really taken off, Alegion Co-founder and CEO Nathaniel Gates told me, because it’s too complex to do correctly. This is especially true on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, atop which Alegion has built its business. Conceptually, he thinks it’s amazing, but the answer to the question of “Why hasn’t it taken off, why hasn’t it revolutionized labor?” is that compared with the rest of the AWS platform, Mechanical Turk is a bear to use…
There’s a perception that the results will be inaccurate, and without knowing how to ensure accurate work, many companies just stay away. However, Gates said, the problem isn’t with the platform or the workers, but with the process. When companies don’t like the results of their crowdsourcing efforts on Mechanical Turk, he said, it’s because “they’re not asking the question correctly and they’re not using best practices to ensure accuracy.”…
Read more from the source: http://gigaom.com/cloud/how-startup-alegion-aims-to-humanize-crowdsourcing/