The aim of Y Combinator-backed startup Parse is to provide backend services for tackling the “monotonous, tedious,” parts of mobile app development, so developers can focus on what truly sets their products apart, rather than the “really common functionality.” Today it’s adding photo moderation to that list of services, thanks to a partnership with CrowdFlower.
The latter company, a TechCrunch 50 graduate that offers tools for managing crowdsourced labor, has already released its own self-serve product for photo moderation. However, Lukas Biewald said that in order to use the CrowdFlower API, developers still need to “write a bunch of code to connect with it.” Integrating through Parse, on the other hand, requires “very little effort.”
Biewald is hoping that will encourage more developers to use Crowdflower from the start, rather than wait until they get into trouble. Biewald said he’s seen a common pattern: “With a lot of people that do user-generated content, when they launch their app, they won’t have a good solution for photo moderation. Then they get in trouble, where it’ll get banned from the App Store, and there’s a huge rush [to integrate with Crowdflower].”
Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar added that “some notion of photo upload” is quite popular, particularly among iOS developers (not that Parse is limited to iOS), though he couldn’t estimate exactly how widespread it is among his company’s customer base.
He also noted that Parse has taken the partnership route for a number of services — integrating Twilio, SendGrid, and Mailgun into its own offerings — because “we want to make sure that we ourselves don’t reinvent the wheel.”