Spare5 Raises $10M Series A Round For Its Mobile Mechanical Turk Service
Spare5
The company says it will use its new funding to grow its “engineering, design, marketing, community management and customer relationship capabilities.”
Spare5 says that Americans spend hours on their phones every day, so they should have some time to “solve tough data problems that are impossible for computers to crack on their own.”
“There will always be data challenges that businesses can’t solve with computing power alone,” said Spare5 CEO and co-founder Matt Bencke. “We’re using technology to scale the unique capabilities of the human mind. For our customers, it’s a fast and cost-effective way to achieve results that would otherwise be impossible. Whether you’re selling online, publishing rich content, or training a machine learning engine, you need to know what people think. We deliver that knowledge with game-changing quality and value.”
The company wouldn’t tell me how much people are making on its service (but it’s probably significantly less than the $8,354 a month many of our commenters’ family members apparently get from Google every month even though they only work a few hours a day).
On Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, about 50 percent of workers are in the U.S. and 40 percent are in India. Spare5 tells me that about 90 percent of its users are in the U.S., with a pretty even male/female ration. Most users are under 30.
Spare5 tells me that it asks new users to fill out an on-boarding survey and to connect through Facebook in order to assure quality control. Tasks are then assigned based on the users’ skills and hobbies.
“We use our proprietary quality algorithms (which include quite a few best practices that have been published by academics) to determine the best answers, aggregate them, and provide them to our business customers,” the company said when I asked how Spare5 handles quality control.
Whether Spare5 can convince enough users to spend their time tagging photos instead of playing Angry Birds remains to be seen. Unless it pays users enough, chances are most will just give it a try and then soon get back to playing Fist of Fury.