Within one month, online service provider humangrid has doubled its number of clickworkers. Some clickworker testimonials: „Transparent, inviting und easily understandable for anyone. My partner told me about humangrid. What impresses me is that before jobs are allocated, it is tested who is suitable for which job.“ – Susan W., Dreieich
Please read and download humangrid’s complete press release.
In the last few weeks there has been a lot of progress at humangrid. You could say we got really lucky.
According to Seneca (roman philosopher and teacher of Nero) luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
In our case preparation has been the result of the hard work of the last few months. Opportunity has been an article in Focus-Magazine about microjobs on the internet. The article was published on August 10. The topic was a review of the microjob platforms Mechanical Turk and humangrid.
But have a look yourself…
Reportedly Focus-Magazine is read by 6 million people every week. To inform such a large number of people that a new, small startup like humangrid exists is basically impossible. You do not have the money to do advertising on such a scale, and if you do not have Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or at least Wendelin Wiedeking as a founder, public interest is not compelling. But we got lucky.
Since August 9 our new website is online. Since then the number of visitors has increased twentyfold. The number of registered and working clickworkers has doubled, and at present we have over 4,000 clickworkers. There are daily calls and emails from potential customers and some larger projects are active on the platform.
Right now we are creating, translating and modifying several thousand texts, over 10,000 addresses are being researched and photos are being analyzed. And last but not least the customers are happy and are reordering.
On the other hand all this activity is slowing the system down a bit. We apologize to all that are affected. But this problem can be fixed quickly and then we’ll be ready for the next growth phase.
August 24, 2009 – Focus.de
I found my plan B for times of crisis on the Internet: German microjob-provider humangrid takes on projects from clients like the Telekom, reduces these to the smallest possible single jobs and passes them on to freelancers called clickworkers.
Please read the complete article at FOCUS.de – in German.
August 19, 2009 – humangrid
At the beginning of the month, humangrid has expanded its range of services with a virtual job market. In the marketplace, customers are now able to submit jobs that will immediately be carried out by qualified clickworkers.
Please read and download humangrid’s complete press release.
The humangrid business idea is based on a relatively new concept, crowdsourcing.
The first examples of crowdsourcing must have been the creation of Wikipedia and of stock photo communities. Work that until then could only have been done by highly paid professionals, in these cases encyclopedia authors and professional photographers, was suddenly done by communities on the internet.
Faster, with more flexibility and with dramatically reduced costs.
humangrid takes this basic idea to the next level. By paying the members of the humangrid community, our clickworkers, crowdsourcing is commercialized. It has become “paid-crowdsourcing”.
The basic advantages are retained. humangrid can accomplish a variety of different tasks much faster, much more flexibly and with dramatically reduced costs, than would have been possible using conventional methods.
Ideally suited are all tasks that can be digitized and split into micro-jobs. In an analogy to Wikipedia the creation of an encyclopedia by splitting it into single texts, and in the case of a stock photo database by splitting it into the creation of single photos.
Furthermore, if the tasks can not be automated, especially when dealing with free text, email, photos, audios and videos that need the intelligent interpretation of human beings, a crowdsourcing solution like humangrid is superior to any other solution. The creation, modification, interpretation, conversion, categorization and search for such data, especially when needed in large quantities, are the perfect tasks for the humangrid community.
The term “Crowdsourcing” has first been used by Jeff Howe. You find his view on the topic in the following link. Jeff Howe – Crowdsourcing video