LAAS – Labour as a service was the new concept revealed by CrowdFlower in TechCrunch50 this year. So what exactly is LAAS. Is it related to SAAS ( Software as a service) in some way? Not really.
Let me put it in simple terms, the way CrowdFlower put it before the audience at TechCrunch50. There are certain mundane and yet time intensive tasks in large companies which may range from removing spam comments on their blog to analysing sentiments about their products on the Web. CrowdFlower provides you a scalable workforce which can take up this task. Quiet a concept, I must say and the business plans seems crystal clear.
So how does this work?
- Say a large company identifies a task which requires LAAS.
- The administrator of the task goes to Crowdflower, fills up a simple form and he is ready to go.
- Crowdflower calculates the amount of effort required per unit of the work and fixes the price accordingly.
- Crowdflower even lets you choose your channel of work.
- You can choose Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, their labour force or a facebook application where people earn virtual currencies by performing tasks.
- At the end of the task Crowdflower does a quality control check and gives the task performer a performance check report card.
- Workers with higher ratings can get hired by Crowdflower.
A very simple concept and yet very powerful. On being asked if they fear getting copied all over the place, they say they have a huge history of workers and how they perform the tasks. According to them others do not have this advantage, but I am not so sure. For me its a good idea but the business plan needs to get better. I was just wondering if the mechanical labour in this case can be students who can earn pocket money by doing these tasks for an hour a day. But it has to be real money and not virtual. A small piece of advise to Crowdflower from my side — Guys, you will be copied and people will give real money for performing tasks right from the outset. When money comes in, quality also comes in.
You can watch their presentation here.
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