REALLY small tasks - crowdsourcing for mobile users

Read a great article this morning that reminded me about an idea I had awhile back to bring Mechanical Turk to the iPhone. It looks like the txteagle group is already thinking along these lines.

From the article in Technology Review (Crowd-Sourcing the World):

Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, is launching a project similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk but that distributes tasks via cell phones. The goal of his project, called txteagle, is to leverage an underused work force in some of the poorest parts of the world.

Amazing stuff. People in developing countries can use their cell phones and make as much as $3/hour. Tasks include transcription, journalism, localization, surveys and more. And I thought the small task outsourcing on sites like SerebraConnect were small!

Crowdsourcing and the virtual workplace

A friend sent this link - How the Virtual Workforce is Changing Everything. It's a good article talking about how telecommuting and outsourcing has morphed into this greater concept of crowdsourcing, also referred to as the Virtual Workplace. From the article:

Companies should not view this new work style [crowdsourcing] as a cost-saving, short-term measure, as there are start-up costs involved.

A big distinguishing factor of this model is that it is a call for work. Many people will reply. Many of them may have a full time job doing other things.

"I don't know if it will ever become the replacement for an employer and an employee in the traditional sense -- but this work style is now a part of the ecosystem. It's sort of a third way," he [Jeff Howe, contributing editor for Wired Magazine] said. 

It is interesting how it warns companies not to crowdsourcing and telecommuting it as a short term solution but also lets them know that this, to some extent, is here whether we like it or not.