MobileWorks: Mobile Human Sourcing Intelligence

Long a follower of human and by extension crowd sourcing human intelligence tasks. Humans are just much better at efficiently performing certain tasks than machines, so why not use humans as a means to solve those task and pass the results to machines to integrate and aggregate the results.  Systems  like Amazon's Mechanical Turk have addressed this capability, and we used it to test the idea.  Yet the MT has difficulties related  to checking and determining the results of such tests.  Now a new idea called Mobileworks to address that issue that is worth a look.  In particular it sources intelligence via mobile:

" ... MobileWorks knows this, but it thinks there’s a better solution than micromanagement. The company has set out to build a workforce comprised exclusively of workers who output consistently good results, to the point that users don’t have to worry about managing their tasks. MobileWorks first got its start in January, when it set out to launch a service for crowd-sourcing tasks that would be completed exclusively by workers on mobile devices (in other words, people would be entering data from their cell phones). The company began approaching mobile retailers in India, asking them to identify and recruit customers who might serve as good candidates. The retailer’s incentive? Anyone wanting to be a MobileWorks worker would need a mobile data plan ... "