Last month saw the launch of CrowdFlower, an interesting venture that applies Dolores Labs’ Labor-as-a-Service platform to the non-profit “micro employment” foundation Samasource.

We’ve previously covered web-based labor and outsourcing services — notably Shorttask and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk — that match-make workers and tasks, and I’ve been critical of the unsustainable payment levels for most of the tasks on offer, often at compensation levels lower than minimum wage.

CrowdFlower puts a new spin on this concept, by assigning tasks to workers in the developing world and from communities that really need opportunity. Though the level of compensation for a typical task is still below normal levels in the developed world, the payment goes to communities where the money appears to be having a very positive impact.

Drawn from Samasource’s base of impoverished women, young people seeking opportunity and refugees, CrowdFlower’s workers are trained to undertake a wide range of computer-based tasks such as audio transcription, application testing, remote virtual assistance and data entry.

With workers drawn from Cameroon, Kenya, India, Pakistan, Ghana and Uganda, it’s likely that their English is of a good enough standard to mean that communication shouldn’t be a problem, and feedback mechanisms are available to rate the outcomes of worker’s tasks.

Mobile Altruism

CrowdFlower is accompanied by an iPhone app, Give Work, which adds another dimension to the service. With Give Work, iPhone owners tasks can also undertake tasks and donate a little of their spare time. Each task you complete via your iPhone is also assigned to a trained refugee in Africa, who is then paid for both their work and yours.

As I write, the task I elected to undertake was to compare images of sneakers an select the pairs that matched my tastes. This took me around 45 seconds, and I’m hoping my trivial efforts will go to help someone in the developing world.

It’s easy to see something like CrowdFlower as form of “digital colonialism,” but it appears to be having a very palpable impact in the communities and lives of the workers employed by Samasource. In essence, this venture is creating an entirely new culture of web workers with potentially promising careers, as well as re-balancing the inequalities between those with opportunity and those without, though it’s worth noting that it isn’t clear that all tasks are always allocated to workers in need.

CrowdFlower’s enabling a laudable mission, with tangible benefit to society. It’s a venture I’ll be keeping a close eye on as I publishing some work tasks of my own. Read more about Samasource in “Samasource: How African refugees are scoring Silicon Valley Internet jobs.”

Are you working with an innovative charitable crowdsourcing project like this? Tell us about it below.

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A compelling reason to use CrossLoop is the innovative Marketplace, which is a great place to find and offer tech support services. With thousands of registered support experts, you can get help with just about anything you can think of. The CrossLoop folks facilitate the connection and transaction, and handle the payment processing. The latest figures released show over 5 million sessions have been conducted through CrossLoop. With the Mac version available, support providers can now offer their services to Mac users, or use their Mac to provide  services. As more households are switching to Mac, or going multi-platform, being able to support everyone makes a lot of sense. Obviously, for Mac users needing support, this also makes the full Marketplace of support providers available to you.

In the CrossLoop community, the demand for a Mac version has been loud and strong. With this milestone reached, they can now work to appease the Linux crowd.

The CrossLoop client is a free download for Windows 2000 or later and, now, for Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Costs for using Marketplace services vary, depending on the services required and choice of provider.

Have you used Crossloop for screen sharing? Does the availability of a Mac version make it an option for you?

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In many ways, ShortTask is similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) service. Like MTurk, ShortTask is seeking to address tasks that aren’t large enough to necessitate the hiring of a contractor or part-time employee. This marketplace is largely oriented around activities that can be completed from home — ideal for web workers — and currently numbers around 61,000 available tasks.

Activities include transcribing audio and video files, annotating images, copywriting, commenting on blog posts or online forums, data entry and online research. Seekers simply publish a task, set a payment level and deadline. Solvers can explore the site and select the tasks they’d like to complete. ShortTask takes a 10 percent commission on each transaction.

ShortTask might be a useful way to find additional work. However, I’m uncomfortable at the payment levels set in the marketplace. Salon published a great article in 2006 examining the labor law implications of Mechanical Turk, “I make $1.45 a week and I love it!,” which suggested that MTurk-like services are undercutting the minimum wage.

For example, today ShortTask has listed a task to transcribe a 22-minute video, within four hours, for $5.50. That’s about $1.30 an hour, or the equivalent of $200 for a month’s work. That particular task is one of the better paying tasks listed at ShortTask; the worst fast-food service jobs will pay you better.

If services like ShortTask expect to flourish, they’ll need seekers to pay fairly, so that a reasonably sized population of solvers can be sustained. More significantly, the marketplace operators should at least adhere to minimum wage levels.

People have fought for the right to be equitably compensated. Codifying that in the services we use to find work is both essential and moral.

What do you think of marketplaces like ShortTask?

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Bizual, as Mashable noted in a recent profile, is a new web service that purports to help small businesses and freelancers attract new customers as well as find new suppliers — essentially a marketplace for matchmaking special offers from suppliers with potential customers.

As cofounder Elliot Jacobs explained, Bizual users sign up (the service is currently in an invitation-only beta test phase) and create “Bizual Offers” that offer incentives on their own products and services. Members can also take up offers from other Bizual members.

The kinds of offers Jacobs described as appropriate for Bizual included:

• 30 minutes of free telephone or email IT support
• 20 percent off personal training sessions
• Free social media SWOT report for your business
• 20 percent off standard rate for a Flash web site
• Free business cards with every identity design
• Up to two hours’ free business start up advice

The company is looking to target smaller businesses and freelancers lacking the resources to market themselves and source suppliers more widely. It’s looking to replicate the success of project management, CRM and billing services apps developed for the same market.

Mashable described Bizual as a “Digg for special offers,” because it enables members to “vote up” and “vote down” offers. It’s not clear if the act of voting is tied to a transaction — like eBay’s feedback profile — or whether, like Digg, votes can be placed irrespective of taking up an offer. It’s crucial that digital reputation models in such a context need to include measures and mechanisms to prevent a member’s reputation from being gamed positively or negatively.

Nevertheless, whether Bizual can attract enough usage to create genuine opportunities for freelancers remains to be seen. For the service to be useful, it needs reach and actively participating members creating offers. I’m inclined to believe that Bizual is something that might exist more naturally within existing communities of trust, such as a LinkedIn network.

Have you tried Bizual? What did you think of it?

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Though marketplace services such as Guru and eLance have ably served freelancers and web workers for some time, LimeExchange seeks to differentiate itself from its predecessors by moving service marketplaces beyond simple matchmaking of buyers and sellers, to eBay-like reputation and feedback metrics that help users understand the prior reputability of their collaborators.

Like other marketplaces, LimeExchange takes a cut of a successfully completed project – quoted up frong at a hefty 8%. One curious feature enables buyers to ‘trial’ sellers with a demonstration of their abilities through a pilot project – the marketplace equivalent of paid pitching?

In other areas, LimeExchange is aping the Q&A and business networking features of LinkedIn, raising questions as to why business networks such as LinkedIn aren’t already offering this?

LimeExchange is part of a new wave of service marketplaces that’re all exploring post-Guru/eLance and post-LinkedIn opportunities that all seek to exploit advances in social networks and social media.

Marketplaces such as Kluster and Cambrian House, seek to aggregate sellers into startup opportunities with shared equity in new ventures, with varying degrees of success. Interestingly, marketplaces like New Zealand’s forthcoming Creative Federation and the UK’s bmedi@ operate tendering models which aggregate members around specific projects or tendering opportunities; bmedi@ in particular is using its position to help freelancers ‘club together’ to tackle larger tenders and promote its region’s members.

LimeExchange is currently orienting its services around design, development, media production, blogging, networking, consulting, writing, legal work, accounting, market research and administration – all areas which appear to correlate closely with our audience here.

I’m curious to hear from readers of Web Worker Daily on their experiences with such services…

• do they contribute a steady pipeline of work for you?
• what proportion of your works originates from such marketplaces?
• do you find most transactions and collaborations to be reputable?
• are the fees reasonable?
• what is lacking?

If we get enough interest responses, I’ll aim to put together a follow up post summarising people’s views.

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By allowing you to build a profile of your skills to share with the public at large, CrossLoop now becomes a viable outlet to promote your business and services beyond friends and family.

The new Marketplace profiles allow you as a “Helper” to post a description of you and your offerings as well as your pricing and areas of expertise. It logs and displays your help sessions and any ratings or feedback you receive while using the CrossLoop application.

For the “Helpee” in need of assistance, an easy search option lets you find helpers who have the expertise you need. You can then sort and filter by location and language. Results are plentiful if not overwhelming. For example, a search for Outlook brings back 360 results. I am thinking a wizard approach might be more useful to pre-filter results to a more manageable level.

Overall, I find the addition of the provider profiles and marketplace to be very well done, particularly the way the web site and application mirror each other with a similar look and feel.

I have always found CrossLoop to be a handy tool in my support arsenal. Folks appreciate that it is easy to install and requires zero configuration. It is 100% permission based and requires an explicit request for assistance and approval step before any information is transfered. The addition of the Marketplace makes it a much more useful tool for a service provider to locate potential clients.

As a Web Worker, it can also be a good place to find help you may need be it for support or perhaps to outsource design or photoshop work for example.

CrossLoop is currently PC Only and leads generated through the Marketplace are currently free, although I imagine this will change.

Can you see value in having your profile listed in the CrossLoop Marketplace? What tools do you use to provide remote support?

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