In 1994, I was introduced to a new innovation called the “internet”. I was in college and I distinctly remember watching a demo of some early version of Mozilla and thinking, “This will change the world.” And, it has. This technology has fundamentally changed the way we play, work, and communicate. More recently, I’ve watched blogs, social networks, and web sites like Wikipedia start to do the same thing.
Today, another world changing innovation is taking place: Broad Outsourcing. Specifically, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. In short, put tasks out to 100’s of thousands of workers around the world and have it done faster and cheaper than you could ever imagine…with quality. From the workers’ standpoint, they can work where they want, when they want, and how they want.
In one of our early tests, we sent out 73,000 tasks and had each task worked 3 times. We defined success as having 2 out of the 3 answers agreeing with ours. If we did this internally, we figured it would take us about 5 months and a cost of about $35,000. Using Turk’s broad outsourcing, we were done in 4 days with an 87.3% success rate. Better yet, we did it very economically. Incredible results.
Now, the internet didn’t solve world hunger and I don’t expect this will either. However, there is a fundamental shift that is going to take place. The same way the internet made information globally accessible, broad outsourcing will make the global workforce accessible. This will change the world.
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