Crowd. Empowered.

One of the things that gets us excited here at MobileWorks is the opportunity to put our technology to use to find solutions to big social problems. Over the past several months, we've been working with a handful of organizations in New York on a pilot initiative that is very central to our social mission -- enabling upward mobility in the Knowledge economy for underemployed or unemployed people.

Today, in partnership with the New York City Economic Development Corporation and a handful of other local partners in New York, we're excited to announce a series of pilot programs called LINK --Leveraging Innovations and our Neighborhoods in the Knowldge economy. The programs are designed to increase computer skills and strengthen employability of participants who've had limited or no access to formal computer training. The goal is to provide participants with training in computer basics--everything from word processing to photo editing--and at the same time give them the opportunity to do real-world projects using these skills to earn money while they learn. Students can take certifications to qualify to work on real-world tasks from real customers while putting their recently learned skills to the test. You can read the NYCEDC press release here.

This "Learn and Earn" platform was developed by MobileWorks by adapting our advaned crowdsourcing technology to help combat the challenges of digital literacy. We're really excited and bullish about the potential of these typs of programs to make a difference in communities around the U.S. Interested in this type of program in your area?  Contact us and let us know how we might partner together.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about why startups don't spend time attacking big social problems.

Here’s an idea.  What if the network of disruptive startups being created in Silicon Valley could band together to disrupt unemployment itself, right here in the US? Today, we’re announcing a new experiment to try and do exactly that.

MobileWorks, Inc., has partnered with civic agencies in the US to start letting organizations throughout the web and all over Silicon Valley work with American workers in job training programs for short online work projects over three-month engagements.

We're calling it the Work for America program, and we're putting out an open call for any interested companies or individuals to pick up the last few slots. For the next seven days, Work for America is giving away heavily-subsidized project work for $600.  

It's a chance to get some high-quality work done right here in the United States while helping US workers in need develop basic technology skills.

What can you get done?

• two months of daily web app testing and feedback,
• 250 targeted leads found through online research,
• 50 pieces of short content writing for things like catalogs or blogs.
• 100 of hours of data entry, and more.  

After the program ends, participants will be able to take skills learned working on Silicon Valley’s projects with them as they’re placed into full-time jobs in their own communities.

Happy 2013!

Today we're launching a new look and a redesign to help improve our service specifically for our MobileWorker community. 

We've been hard at work, gathering feedback and giving our service a makeover so it's even easier to use and earn money as a MobileWorker. 

Next time you sign in to your account, you'll notice a whole bunch of improvements, including:

• Choose which type of tasks you'd like to do.
• A new certification system so that you can qualify to work on a variety of tasks, everything from video analysis to transcription. The more certifications you earn, the more types of work you'll be able to complete.
• New, easier-to-use service with a fresh design.
• The opportunity to learn new computer skills.

If you are an existing MobileWorker, all of your current account statistics and payment balance will remain the same. Any certifications you've earned will carry-over to the new system. To help familiarize you with all of the improvements, next time you sign in you'll have the opportunity to follow a brief walkthrough that will familiarize you with the new interface.

We're excited about these changes and are eager to hear your feedback!  Let us know what you think.

In Reuters, Jeremy Wagstaff explains how MobileWorks has a leg up on outsourcing and on freelancer marketplaces like Elance: 

"In the past couple of years, other startups have tried to mend weak links in the chain. A potential employer posting a project on Elance or oDesk, for example, can be overwhelmed by applicants - making it difficult for them to find the best freelancers quickly, and harder for freelancers to stand out from the crowd.

Kulkarni hopes to solve this problem by having his startup MobileWorks train workers to guarantee quality, and by breaking down projects into micro-tasks to lift less-skilled workers onto their first rung. Tasks range from transcribing hedge fund forms to generating sales leads.

'This is moving the entire BPO industry - that was dominated by these large middlemen organisations that take most of the profits - to the cloud,' says Anand Kulkarni, an academic-turned-entrepreneur. 'Now you no longer need to be able to afford Infosys rates to be able to get quality results out of an outsourcing system.' "

With the MobileWorks crowdsourcing platform, anyone can analyze large sets of data that are simple for humans, but difficult for computers to understand. In the spirit of the upcoming U.S. 2012 Presidential Election, we initially ran a small experiment to show how - without any programming knowledge - anyone could build a high quality, data driven, analysis on a subject. For this experiment we chose to show America’s play-by-play reactions to this year’s presidential election.

For this initial test we collected 900 tweets (data points) between September 10th and September 11th, 2012. We sent this data via our BrainPower API to our distributed workforce to answer two questions per tweet for us. First question: “What political party is the tweet about?” Of the 900 tweets, 39% were categorized as either about the Republican Party or Democratic Party. The rest were about other parties or other aspects of the election not related to a specific party or not about the election at all. Second question: “What is the sentiment of the tweet?” Is the tweet Positive, Negative, or Neutral about the Political Party? The graph below best shows the results.

• Rather than a catch-all reply to any @mention, an intelligent reply could be generated within a specific set of options
• Use this same process to analyze the sentiment of any subject, including your company's twitter followers
• Marketing to potential customers with intelligently designed messages: “Does anyone know when Metallica will be in SF again?”, your event ticketing company twitter account replies with “Hi @MetallicaFan Buy your Metallica tickets for SF – February 1st, 2013 at TheBestTicketingPlace.com/Metallica-SF/”

We will continue to gather and analyze data up until the day after the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election and periodically update our blog with analysis. If you are interested in receiving updates subscribe to our mailing list.

MobileWorks finished its 1 millionth task this month, and TechCrunch has the story:

MobileWorks set out with a different approach (and a social mission) — to pay workers fair wages and create a collaborative online work environment in which microwork would become less anonymous and more like a self-organizing virtual office. The startup believes that this approach can lower the cost of obtaining quality work or results, pay fewer workers more and, in so doing, enable non-enterprise (i.e. smaller companies) to tap into the benefits of crowdsourcing.

The company announced today that its workers have collectively completed one million commercial tasks since launch. What’s more, companies have effectively outsourced five continuous years of work in the last year by hiring its cloud-based crowd, which the team believes is a testament to how much businesses can accomplish by collaborating with a virtual labor pool.

MobileWorks automatically identifies its brainiest members and calls on them to manage the rest of the crowd, with the top one percent of the workforce being able to review everybody’s performance, train workers, hire and fire, and review answers. It’s potentially dangerous, but it also has a lot of advantages. The brainier members of the crowd don’t feel like they’re bored or being held down, others get a sense of the opportunity for upward mobility. What’s more, the crowd is just much more likely to be content and produce good work if it’s policing and monitoring itself, instead of feeling like Big Brother is watching. And that’s good for business.

There are a lot of underprivileged, underemployed workers out there in developing parts of the world who can be trained to be effective workers within MobileWorks’ framework — which, in turn, can help lift them up.

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of our crowd computing platform, MobileWorks is providing one full month* of accurate crowdsourcing power to an inspirational nonprofit, government entity, or academic institution that is working to make the world a better place. Interested? Tell us why your favorite organization should be accepted and what they would use the MobileWorks crowd to do by applying before August 30.

Image credit: Will Clayton

What could your favorite organization do with one month of free time with the MobileWorks crowd? Some examples might include:

• Generate a list of 10,000 new leads to register for bone marrow donation
• Turning stacks of paper into digital files for a local health clinic
• Eliminating all the duplicate names in a database of donors
• Transcribing hours of audio from your library's archives
• Labeling millions of proteins to discover new treatments for disease
• Categorizing all the archeological data discovered at a recent dig
• ...limitless other possibilities!

Any charity, research group at an academic institution, or non-profit organization is eligible to apply. Apply here using this entry form. And help spread the word!

Not a nonprofit organization?  You can still use the MobileWorks crowd to get just about any online work done for just $5 an hour.  Try it out now or drop us a line at hello@mobileworks.com.

*That's equivalent to 30 full-time person-days!

The East Bay Express writes about how MobileWorks aims to fix what's wrong with crowdsourcing:

"Obviously, from the perspective of the workers, folks would be working for hours at a time just to make a few cents," he said. A couple years ago, Kulkarni himself went on Turk, just to see how long it would take him to earn a dollar. It took more than an hour. "It was incredibly painful," he said. "It's so difficult to earn a living wage."

The irony is that requesters aren't even necessarily getting what they want out of it either. "You'd get right answers sometimes, wrong answers sometimes, and you'd never know if your results would get completed," said Kulkarni. Part of the problem with paying people so little — and doing so in a completely anonymous, decentralized system — is that people have a huge financial incentive to game the system. Chirag Ahuja, the inbound marketing director for a company called TranscribeMe, said that the inaccuracy and slow turnaround time associated with Turk eventually made his company move away from the service. "Accuracy was good about 70 percent of time. The [other] 30 percent was spam," Ahuja wrote in an email. "Workers were submitting spam and expecting to get paid."

But Kulkarni and his co-workers think they've found a solution to that, and it's a simple one: "We believe that as soon as you're paying people a fair living wage, they don't need to cheat the responses," he said. "They're just a lot less likely to scam the system." MobileWorks isn't a charity, like Samasource, which means it's intended to work within the system, rather than alongside it. Employees work from mobile phones and cheap laptops; the majority of them are women, and all of them are based in the developing world. They get paid roughly twice as much as Turkers do, according to the company.

You can read the story in the Jamaican press, here and here.