CrowdFlower Video
Transcription:
Fox Business: No more sitting behind a desk or hours stuck in traffic. CrowdFlower takes big projects and splits them up into smaller pieces, divvies up those smaller pieces to different workers. If you just have a computer or internet connection you can get the work done without getting out of your pajamas.
Lukas Biewald is the 29 year old CEO of CrowdFlower and he joins us now from San Francisco.
You're going to have to explain this with a tangible example. You want to get a big project done, and you split it up and divvy up the work between a lot of different people. Tell me a place where that can work.
Lukas: We work with a lot of companies that have big databases of customers or business. They have the contact information, and as you know businesses change address and phone number all the time. And so what companies are used to doing is having a few people who go through the list and call up the business (or go on a website) and check, right? What we do is we take that same task and we split it up into each individual record in the database, and we send it to thousands of people across the country and let them all work on it in parallel so a job that might have taken months to get done get done in a day or two.
FB: What you're doing there is you're using people- if we talked about outsourcing for example, jobs might go away completely. Or if we talked about technology, taking jobs away it might be a computer doing the job of a person. But you're actually using people- more of them- does this create more jobs if more people used it, is that fair?
Lukas: Yeah, and thats the thing I love about our company. It uses technology to create jobs and sometimes bring jobs back from outsourcing. If you think about outsourcing its a hundred billion dollar industry, but in some cases it's just not that efficient, right? I mean you have jobs being sent around the world through internet, you have to build new buildings you have to build computers for people- and people in the United States have a lot of this infrastructure in their own homes.
FB: So you're using it now with this- you gave the example of working out the contacts for a company or what have you. What's the future? What's something else that maybe now is not being done well that this sort of method, "crowdsourcing" as it's called, could do better, do you think?
Lukas: My company CrowdFlower is really focused on simple repetitive jobs. That's where we start, right? So things like checking if an image matches a product for an online retailer or sending someone to an address to take a picture of a business maybe for a real estate company. Kind of simple things like that that almost anyone can do from their own homes.
From here, I think there are a lot of interesting applications like translation, transcribing audio so that deaf people can have more access to media. Things like that.
FB: Those are both pretty cool. We like it, it's innovative, that's for sure. Thanks for coming on, Lukas Biewald.
