Posts Tagged ‘amazon’
Written on August 13th, 2010 by PricesTechno shouts
Labor as a service startup CloudCrowd has just raised $5.1 million in funding, according to an recent SEC filing. We’ve confirmed the funding with the startup, which had previously raised $1.5 million in seed funding. This recent round of funding was led by DFJ with and the startup’s co-founder and CEO Alex Edelstein participating in the round. Like CrowdFlower and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk , CloudCrowd is trying to bring labor into the cloud, by creating a vast network of workers around the globe. The startup has roughly 25,000 workers, who have completed more than a million tasks since the site’s launch in October 2009. You can read our recent coverage and video interview with CloudCrowd here. The bulk of CloudCrowd’s business are client-driven tasks: a company submits tasks to CloudCrowd and the service will farm that out to eligible workers. Workers can also access CloudCrowd through a Facebook app, where they can pick available tasks and arrange payment.The tasks can be as simple as checking the quality of an image or involve the translation of entire web pages. Because pricing is determined by the level of difficulty, the payouts range from one penny to several dollars. Once a task is completed, a different user will check the finished product for an additional fee, creating a level of quality control. With each task completed, a worker earn a credibility rating that determines the types of tasks they are offered. Workers who don’t have a rating yet are assigned basic tasks until they develop a reputation. Workers are able to see how much each separate task pays, and earnings are distributed through PayPal. CloudCrown also has a consumer facing business. The company offers EditZen, a simple web site, where consumers can submit pages for editing at $4 a page. The also plans to launch TranslationZen, which will offer translation services with a similar labor model. And the model is seeing success. The company is on track to complete 2 million tasks, and this round of funding should help scale the business further. CrunchBase Information CloudCrowd Information provided by CrunchBase
Written on August 12th, 2010 by PricesTechno shouts
Yesterday morning, Ed Stafford and Cho Sanchez walked out of the jungle , onto the beach and into the Atlantic Ocean. 859 days earlier, Stafford had begun the walk at the headwaters of the Amazon and followed that river for almost two years and nearly 4,000 miles, picking up Sanchez five months into the trip. In addition to being the first person to walk the entirety of the world’s greatest river by drainage and second-greatest by length, Stafford was the first to blog such a trip. He blogged, Twittered and uploaded photos and video the whole way on the trip site, Walking the Amazon. Sponsor Feelings? Almost impossible to convey. I’d prepared myself to be disappointed but I was close to tears looking out into the warm crashing waves with Cho at my side. A day I will never forget for the rest of my life. No-one will ever take that away from us. World of Firsts The first goal of the expedition was to do something that had never been done before, and surprisingly, it hadn’t been. The subsequent goals were a low-key approach to increasing awareness of the boon and threats the Amazon gives and receives. Nothing militant, just an infectious object lesson on why the Amazon is worthy of consideration even by people who will never come anywhere near it. Stafford checked in to the wider world and noted progress, reaction by indigenous groups and whatever else grabbed his attention. He carried AST Thrane satellite phones connected to Inmarsat, a GPS unit, a rugged laptop computer (on which Google Earth was sometimes consulted) and a Sony HVR-A1E camcorder, all double-bagged against the relentless wet. Perhaps the most unexpected tech is a set of 40-year old Peruvian Geographical Society 1:100,000 topographical maps . You Can’t Amplify What’s Not There Tech enabled Stafford to do some things he couldn’t. Primarily, it helped get the message out and keep it out, hooking people into the excitement of what he and Cho were doing. It extended and amplified what Stafford was doing. But even as it did so it reaffirmed what anyone who’s ever been thrown back on their own devices knows: without their own devices, additional ones won’t keep you safe. Congratulations to Ed and Cho. They’re co-recipients of the first annual ReadWriteWeb Good Bad I’m the Guy with the Gun Award for exceptional bad-assery while connected to the Web. Last Day of Walking the Amazon. Arrival at the Atlantic Ocean from Walking the Amazon Videos on Vimeo . Photo of Ed and Cho by Keith Ducatel Discuss
Written on August 9th, 2010 by PricesTechno shouts
Google continues to gobble up companies that will form the backbone of it’s new social strategy and the upcoming war with Facebook . Last week it was Slide . And they are now buying Jambool and their Social Gold payment product, we’ve heard from multiple sources. The purchase price is $55 million plus another $15 million -$20 million in an earnout, say our sources. Social Gold gives app developers the ability to build payments directly into their games and other applications. It was founded by Amazon veterans Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein , and has raised $6 million in funding. Like other payments companies they’ve been hit very hard by Facebook Credits. Gupta recently went on a bit of a rant about Facebook Credits, in fact. See our recent What Games, Places, Music And News Could Mean For Google Checkout for how Google might implement Social Gold into their existing checkout product and their new social platform. Google isn’t commenting on the story. We haven’t heard back from Jambool. CrunchBase Information Jambool Google Information provided by CrunchBase
Written on August 8th, 2010 by PricesTechno shouts
On Tuesday, AdGrok co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez penned a masterfully incendiary blog post in which he blasted the “backwater” tech scene in New York. It was only the company’s third post on its blog, but it was a doozy. Go read it. Sponsor Now imagine, for a moment, what happened to a brand new startup with a brand new blog when thousands of people on Tuesday did just that: on someone’s recommendation, they clicked through to read to the post. The post was voted to the top of Hacker News . Robert Scoble tweeted a link. The post hit Techmeme . By one o’clock in the afternoon, AdGrok’s blog was “totally wedged and we all start panicking. We can’t even SSH into the box.” On Wednesday, AdGrok followed up with ” a blog post about a blog post ,” in which the startup discussed its experiences and “lessons learned” from having an unexpectedly successful blog post and from having an unexpectedly slammed server. The post notes the importance of Twitter as a distribution channel, the usefulness of browser-based Olark for real-time chat and customer support, the recommendation for the WP-Cache plugin for better WordPress performance, the accuracy of Google Analytics. Not given as part of the bulleted list of observations was Garcia-Martinez’s “incantation of Amazon EC2 demons.” Although it’s not clear how much of AdGrok keeping their systems running on Tuesday was the incantation, how much was the demon, and how much was the cloud, it’s recognition that responsive scalability should be a key consideration when planning your startup infrastructure. Your blog getting a sudden influx of traffic, your website getting swamped on launch day – these are good things, and you want to be prepared to respond. You don’t want to get some great buzz, then have your server combust. AdGrok has successfully generated some buzz with original blog content. It managed to keep the blog up when under fire. The next task, of course, is sustaining and extending that momentum. Photo credit: Flickr user Wonderlane Discuss
Written on August 2nd, 2010 by PricesTechno shouts
Ben Patterson – Just days after announcing a new, smaller Kindle — including a cheaper, Wi-Fi-only model — Amazon has announced that the revamped Kindle is “temporarily” sold out, with new shipments not expected until early September.
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