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Return of the Mechanical Turk
Amazon ran into challenges sorting out photos for its A9 Yellow Pages. It turned out that computers weren’t very good at identifying which of several photos taken of a particular business was the best one. Only humans could do this efficiently and accurately. So Amazon devised a system to farm out this piecework to people for a penny or two apiece—more for fun than big pay.
It seemed to work well enough that last November, Amazon turned this into a new online service, called Amazon Mechanical Turk—so named for an 18th century chess-playing machine that actually had a chess master hidden inside. Now, Amazon was turning its Web services into something really far afield from its retail origins—entirely new services that could be tapped on demand. Startups are sprouting on top of the service, such as CastingWords, which farms out snippets of podcasts to transcribe for clients. But Amazon was far from done with this new line of services.
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