Remote crowdworking

As connectivity and technology mean the barriers to outsourcing are beginning to almost disappear entirely, outsourcing is graduating into another trend that is changing how we treat repetitive human work. Crowdworking is growing, fast. Ville Miettinen, chief executive of "human powered document processing" service Microtask, says business at his crowdworking company is increasing at around 400% year-on-year - and his experience is typical of the wider industry.

Heaphy Project
Willow Garage is a robotics company based in California. It pioneers the use of human-in-the-loop systems - that is, actions which robots can't quite manage on their own, but with a simple piece of human intervention can finish the job. By using Mechanical Turk, Amazon's crowdworking platform which allows workers all over the world to remotely carry out small tasks for small cash rewards. Its Heaphy Project is a system which allows a person to control a robot remotely using just a web browser.

Microtask's Mr Miettinen offers a massive workforce available at a company's beck and call without the hassle. "The individual tasks are really small," Mr Miettinen explains. "It can be just a single word out of a document. They're not seeing the entire page, they don't know what the rest of the page contains, and they also don't know who else is working on it." It means several people, in several continents, can all collaborate to process one individual form.