zCrowd

09/23/2015

In Seattle? Come to our meetup September 30: What To Do When Majority Rules Sucks - Quality Control Strategies A/B Tested

This month, we're serving a light lunch! No need to brown bag it. :-) The topic we will be delving into are the strategies used to ensure quality when working with the crowd. Majority Rules, Go

08/24/2015

A new paper suggests that AI may not steal as many jobs from humans as previously though. What do you think?

The robots might take our jobs. But they'll also create new ones.

08/18/2015

We believe there’s a shortage of high-skill work in the crowd, and specifically on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Our aim is to become the most trusted providers of online work, both for our workers and for our clients. Soon we’ll be building our own labor channel, and we’ll be working from the beginning to find ways for workers to put those unused skills to work. We’ll also be looking at ways to help workers build and develop skills, all the while tracking performance and reliability in the interest of building a data-driven system that recognizes and rewards good worker characteristics. If the sharing economy truly is the future of work, we ought to make it beneficial for everyone involved. We believe this is how to achieve that end.

Read more: https://zcrowd.com/education-high-skills-crowdsourcing/

08/05/2015

How do freelancers affect the Job Creation Index? It's now at a record high for the third month in a row.

Gallup's U.S. Job Creation Index maintained its record high of +32 in July for the third month in a row.

08/03/2015

"Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin' away/On the streets of Philadelphia."

HitchBot trekked more than 3,000 miles across Canada last summer but lasted only 300 miles in the U.S. before being vandalized beyond repair.

07/22/2015

Considering the continued changes at Amazon's Mechanical Turk, particularly the implementation of the Masters Program and today's price changes, we believe that it is no longer a true crowdsourcing platform.

Amazon's digital labor platform Mechanical Turk has long been moving away from true crowdsourcing, argues zCrowd Chief Product Officer Isaac Nichols.

07/21/2015

Uber drives on in Europe.

In the wake of growing regulatory problems, the ride-booking company said it would continue taking legal action against European countries that ban some of its services.

07/17/2015

Too many "lawsuits over whether Homejoy cleaners were employees."

On-demand house cleaning service Homejoy is shutting down, after talks of an acquisition by its biggest competitor and a failure to raise enough money to keep..

06/23/2015

How do we make the work for everyone involved, not just the platforms? As companies push for a new worker designation, somewhere between a 1099 and W-2, what can we do to protect workers in this new economy?

Faced with lawsuits that could threaten their business models, tech companies are pushing for a new classification of worker that would combine the flexibility afforded to contractors with the prot...

06/19/2015

Check out zCrowd Chief Architect and Spokesman Kevin Klinemeier on four ways to prep sensitive data for crowd processing. It's totally what you want to be doing this Friday PM!

What are safe and even HIPAA-compliant ways to process sensitive data and documents using crowdsourcing? Here we discuss four options.

06/10/2015

What will the role of government be in the so-called sharing economy, and what should it be?

Two conferences in Washington on Tuesday examined peer-to-peer Internet companies like Uber and explored their impact on the economy and how and when regulators should step in.

06/10/2015

"'I don’t know of a single dry eye in the audience when those robots fell down,' he said at a news briefing on Saturday after just three of the 25 robot competitors had ended the challenge with perfect scores."

A Darpa robotic competition in California focused on machines that can perform ordinary tasks that were the furthest thing from the killer automatons of science fiction.