•
"It's not about the value of the task, it's about the value of me not having to do it, or even think about it anymore." That's how Ted Roden describes Fancy Hands , his new side project that provides virtual personal assistants in the cloud for a low monthly fee. Need an appointment made for you? Research done on Fantasy Baseball players you might want to draft onto your team? Roden has hired more than 100 people based in the US and England who can perform almost any quick, legal task for you, within minutes, at any hour day or night. You can send them 15 emails with task requests per month for a $30 fee. An algorithm sorts the tasks and routes each one to the most appropriate person. Sponsor Roden says the people he's hired include retired lawyers, actors waiting with time to spare before going on camera and former employees of competitor ChaCha . He wrote a program to sift through piles of applications and plans on using the company's own service providers to select new hires in the future as well. Roden himself has a day job in the R&D department of the New York Times. He's a creative dynamo whose energy spills out in side projects like the visually compelling social bookmarking service EnjoysThin.gs and an O'Reilly book about building real-time websites , due out this Summer. Previously, he was the 2nd full-time programmer at art-video portal Vimeo . Roden says he built Fancy Hands because he wanted to build something big. He calls it that just because it was the filename for his first bit of code, a tradition across all his projects. He's bootstrapping it himself "and my wife says it's ok," he says. Casting The Tasks Fancy Hands is easy for customers to use. I asked the service to find where in town I could buy a "sweater bag" to run sweaters through the washing machine and got a great response, complete with multiple options online and a personal recommendation, within an hour. I asked for links to reviews of iPad RSS reading applications and the first response I got was terrible. I emailed back complaining and the person on the other end sent me back something even worse. Then Roden noticed and reassigned the request to someone who filled it beautifully. Roden says that for now he's doing the quality control himself and generally well after the tasks have been completed. He's got a complex series of tubes and pulleys rigged up to sort tasks, though. He calls it "the eHarmony of Getting Things Done." Social search Aardvark started out as a lot of manual human effort behind public facing technology, then became a search-sorting algorithmic people-connector that Google bought for millions. Fancy Hands is half human and half-machine, too. It connects your emailed task requests with the right staff members to fill them. In that way it's a little reminiscent of Aardvark , the social search startup that began as a human bucket brigade behind a facade of technology and ended up a complex web of computer science that Google acquired this Winter for millions of dollars . At its core Fancy Hands is people, though. And the people are paid by the task. Roden has created a system that ranks tasks by complexity and rewards assistants with higher pay when they complete harder tasks. Once they reach a particular pay grade, all their tasks become better paying, thus incentivizing them to dive in to harder and harder work. The people behind the scenes are often surprisingly enthusiastic. Roden says that compared to other, similar systems, Fancy Hands is more affordable, competitive on speed and often surprisingly superior in quality of results. At least at launch, the people he's hired seem relatively interested in the project and the work. This afternoon I asked Fancy Hands to make me an appointment with "Bob's Heating System Repair" and gave it my own phone number to call, just to see how it went down. I answered my next inbound call with "hello, Bob's heating repair, this is Bob." And went through a few minutes of appointment conversation before telling the virtual assistant what I was really doing. I think he felt a little bit toyed with, but he was very professional before and after I disclosed my true identity. He said he had interacted just a little bit with Ted and that he was very interested to see what kind of research he would be tasked with doing. He was very cautious about telling me anything specific about what the system was like on his end because "we're a brand new company, just starting." I thought it was charming that one of the 100 people hired to do tasks for a fee felt so closely associated with the business. These Hands Are Fancy People familiar with this kind of "human powered micro-outsourcing" will no doubt be familiar with Amazon's Mechanical Turk. All kinds of businesses bid for Turk users to perform rapid little tasks that require just a touch of human intelligence. Spammers pay Turkers to leave spammy spam around the web, podcasters pay Turkers to transcribe tiny fragments of audio files, businesses like Citysearch and Yelp pay Turkers to confirm changes to local business listings submitted by users. It's a big business, a platform that other businesses are being built on top of. These services can be taken too far, of course. Author Tim Ferriss famously paid a team of assistants to pretend to be him on dating websites. They vetted women for intelligence and appearance before scheduling a day full of short first dates all in a row. That's just dishonest, an interpersonal crime of convenience. There's something both more and less human about what Fancy Hands is doing, though. Its algorithmic task sorting could become very complex but the people on both ends are more invested, too. Roden says his model of $30 for 15 tasks per month makes people stop and ponder whether a task is really one they want to expend part of their monthly subscription on. There's something intriguing about that. For himself, Ted Roden has a simple rule for using the system he built. "If I think about anything twice, I just put it into Fancy Hands," he says. It will be interesting to see how often his customers think about Fancy Hands and whether enough of them will renew their subscriptions to make this a sustainable service. If nothing else, this mix of human and machine is thought provoking, and perhaps prescient, in the way it strategically blends the online and offline worlds. Photo by Justin Ouellette . Discuss
Read the rest here:
Fancy Hands: Virtual Assistants, Aardvark Style
Tags:
amazon,
Business,
citysearch,
Fancy,
Legal,
online,
people,
person,
project,
social,
tasks,
virtual,
work
•
Do you already own an iPhone or iPod Touch and are planning on buying an iPad , too? Then you need to know about the new "universal" applications now available in the iTunes App Store. These combo apps for Apple's line of mobile devices are basically "buy one, get one free" deals except for one small difference - both apps are bundled into one download. When you run the universal application on a small-screened device, you'll see the iPhone version and when you run the app on your iPad, you'll see the larger, iPad-only version. And these won't just be blown up, oversized iPhone apps either - they'll be custom designed apps made specifically for the iPad. Sponsor How To Find Universal Apps When searching through the application store, you can identify the universal apps by the small plus sign that appears to the left of the application's price in the search results. Or, if viewing the description page for an application, the left-side column will read "This app is designed for both iPhone and iPad" underneath the app's icon and price. There are a few applications already available which support this new pricing format, for example, Pandora , Instapaper Pro , Evernote , WordPress , LogMeIn Ignition , IMDb and Now Playing . Some other applications even include the word "universal" in their application title. Unfortunately, Apple's own e-Reader application, iBooks , is not one of them. There is no addition configuration needed in order to choose the right version for the device you have plugged into your Mac or PC prior to syncing. If you're syncing your iPhone, the iPhone application is copied over to your device. If you're syncing your iPad, the iPad application will copy over. App Sharing: This is Why the iPad Doesn't (Yet) Replace Your PC or Mac The only problem with this configuration is that it does require that you actually sync your iPad to your computer. Yes, you need to hook up your new tablet computer - you know, the one designed to replace your notebook or netbook - to your computer. That's the only way to make the universal app available to your other mobile devices via your iTunes library.
Tags:
applications,
description,
gadget,
iPad,
iphone,
itunes,
library,
online,
sharing,
the-application,
universal
•
Wikipedia , the online user-created encyclopedia and the number six website on the Internet today, is about to get a makeover. And it's a big one. According to a blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation User Experience team detailing the changes, the upcoming Wikipedia redesign, due to launch April 5, aims to make the site easier to navigate, easier to search and, perhaps most importantly, easier to edit. Sponsor Easier is Better The upcoming design, code-named "Vector," has been in use over the past six months by a group of 500,000 beta testers. Included in the update are changes like simplified navigation, a relocated search box, clutter reduction and even an updated Wikipedia logo. Also, all English Wikipedia users will soon be able to create PDFs and printed books from Wikipedia articles, a service previously available only to logged-in users. However, the most interesting change is how Wikipedia is making the page edit functions easier. A new toolbar will be provided which lets editors more easily insert links and tables, and an included cheatsheet will help users access the most commonly used functions. These editing changes launching next month are only the beginning, notes Naoko Komura on the Wikimedia blog . Later this year, the site will see even more radical revamps to the editing process. This includes the following: Reducing the amount of wiki code users see in the edit system and making it possible to change data in tables and information boxes through simple forms. Cleaning up the edit page itself, to use more understandable language and get rid of confusing clutter. Providing a new outline tool to navigate a long article while you're editing it. Wikipedia Needs More Editors Now the question is whether or not these changes will encourage more people to actually edit the online encyclopedia because, surprisingly, few users actually do. Wikipedia is often heralded as a shining example of how there's power in the "wisdom of the crowds," a phrase that implies how a diverse collection of individuals can be more accurate than individuals or even experts. However, the dirty little secret about the supposedly "crowd-edited" online encyclopedia is that, even though anyone and everyone can edit it, few do so. In fact, only 1% of Wikipedia users are responsible for half of the site's edits . Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has even been quoted as saying that the site is really written by a community, "a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers." Given these statistics, it's no surprise that Wikipedia wants to make some changes. Recent reports point to slowed growth , a downward trend that may be partly to blame on the increasingly complex editing process, according to some experts. Dr. Ed H Chi, a scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center in California, told the Telegraph that the site had become a "more exclusive place", where only a handful of the most experienced editors were responsible for editing and maintaining the site. In other words, Wikipedia became a site that wasn't representing the "wisdom of the crowds" anymore, but the "wisdom of an elite group." That in, turn, may have caused the slowdown. Over the past several years, the number of new articles per day has dropped from 2,200 in July of 2007 to 1,300 today. Is It Too Late? Or Just in Time? By simplifying the editing process, Wikipedia could potentially reverse this trend -
Tags:
crowds,
crowdsourcing,
editing,
internet,
online,
organization,
over-the-past,
research,
research-center,
wikimedia,
Wikipedia,
wikipedia-needs,
words
•
As one of ReadWriteWeb's iPhone users, I'm always looking for new applications to try out. Some get downloaded for a day and then deleted right away, others slowly inch their way closer to my homescreen. Even rarer are the ones that become actively used on a regular basis. Occasionally, we like to share our findings regarding our favorite new apps. (See, for example, last month's list here ). Although I can't guarantee that all of the ones on the list below will become favorites forever , they piqued my interest enough to get a coveted spot on my iPhone this month. Let us know what you think about their potential for long-lasting success. Sponsor 1. Miso I've been playing with Miso off and on for a week or so. Dubbed a "Foursquare-Like App for Homebodies" by yours truly, this app lets you "check-in" to the TV shows and movies you're watching and earn badges. While I like the idea, I've found that the app suffers from the lack of an easy way to find and follow other users. That leaves us TV-watching "stay-at-home" folks feeling a little too isolated when already taking part in a rather non-social, non-interactive activity. However, if the app can improve the ability to find and follow other like-minded entertainment consumers, there's potential for a fun "niche use" type of app here. (Review: Miso: A Foursquare-Like App for Homebodies ) 2. MediaServer MediaServer seems so promising, but I've had trouble getting all aspects of it to work properly. The app is designed to be an easy way to view your iPhone media on your TV set by way of a Media Center-type hardware device (XMBC, Boxee, etc.) or game console (PS3, XBox 360). And it is easy to use. You install the app, launch it, and boom!, your media console sees your iPhone - no configuration required. As far as viewing user-created videos or photos, the app excels. But streaming music or video? Not so much. Due to varying degrees of DRM applied to the files themselves and codec support on the hardware device, playing media on your TV is harder than it should be. (I tried with the Xbox in my tests.) Whether it's the app that's to blame or the hardware, I can't tell. However, MediaServer did become a great way to do iPhone photo slideshows on the TV and that alone is keeping it on my phone for now. Hopefully the rest will be improved in time. 3. Sticky Bits The RWW bloggers who attended the recent SXSW festival have come back raving about the barcode-scanning Stickybits app (iTunes link). The app, which debuted at the conference, goes hand-in-hand with the online service that lets you either print your own barcodes or buy pre-made stickers which you can then associate with real-world objects. Using the Stickybits iPhone application, anyone encountering these stickers in the wild can scan them to discover whatever data theyv'e been associated with. Will Stickybits actually stick around though? It's too soon to tell, but it sure is fun to play with in the meantime. (Review: Stickbits: Portal to Another Dimension or Graffiti for Nerds? ) 4. Siri Although not brand-new, the Siri app which debuted in February on the iPhone is rapidly becoming one of our all-time favorites and therefore has to make this list again. If you have not installed Siri yet, do so now! Built with artificial intelligence technology, Siri functions as a personal assistant which can provide information on a variety of topics from weather to movie listings to restaurants, events and more. You can either type into the app's search box or speak your query to get started. And the more you use it, the smarter it gets. The voice recognition works well, too, although it never understood "Alice in Wonderland movie" no matter how many times I said it. (Maybe it already knew I wouldn't like that movie?) We'll give it a pass there, though - voice recognition is a tough nut to crack. Still, the intelligence of this app will soon have you relocating the apps it replaces (movie listing apps, restaurant finders, etc.) to back screens of the iPhone. (Review: Siri: Your Personal Assistant for the Mobile Web ) 5. Tweeb Obsessed with ego-tracking your Twitter stats or tasked with managing a corporate account of some kind? Then Tweeb's new Twitter analytics tracker (iTunes link) is a handy app to have. For $1.99, you get access to real-time, on-demand statistics including tweet counts, follower counts, retweets, mentions and clickthroughs on your tweeted links. You can also use the app to tweet, manage your friends, block or unblock users, view Twitter profiles, view your following lists and manage multiple Twitter accounts. The data is presented in clean, easy-to-read layouts and there is even a history section so you can measure your growing influence over time. Well worth a couple of bucks if you access this data on a regular basis! 6. Buzzie The first app to access Google Buzz natively is pretty great, but I'll admit that I'm more likely to switch over to Buzz from Google Reader's mobile website than launch a standalone app. If the iPhone had app multitasking though, that would be a different story. Still, Buzzie has a few standout features - photo-sharing and photo browsing, most notably. It also feels "a lot snappier" than Google Buzz's web app, noted Frederic earlier this month during his demo. (Review: Buzzie: The First Native Mobile App for Google Buzz ) 7. SpringPad Part of Springpad's service , this Evernote competitor functions as a mobile note-taking and reminder app. Similar to Evernote's offering, you can write a note or snap a photo to remember something (which is then added to your online account), but it also introduces barcode-scanning as another way to "remember" an item. You can use the app to access all your saved data, too - handy for accessing shopping lists, recipes and restaurants you want to try while you're out and about. (Review: Springpad Takes on Evernote with Semantic Technology, Barcode Scanner ) Honorable Mentions Other apps getting demoed on our iPhones include the following: Brizzly for Twitter : Will we leave Tweetie 2 for this new Twitter iPhone app? It could happen! Feathers : Want to have a little fun with your tweets? Feathers lets you decorate them with symbols, icons or even post them upside-down. Notifio : Just launched, this app tries to bring Android-style notifications to one central place on the iPhone, but it's dependent on others to use its API to do so. If successful, it could be amazing...but that remains to be seen. You can see all the apps on my iPhone courtesy of AppsFire here . Discuss
Go here to see the original:
Weekend Fun: New Apps for Your iPhone
Tags:
api,
apple,
data,
demo,
drm,
game-console,
google-buzz,
graffiti,
iphone,
mobile,
online,
semantic
•
This morning, the Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign to bring video to Wikipedia . The project encourages Wikipedia users to add videos using the "100% free and open source video stack powered by HTML5 and Theora" that is the standard for the site. Our contention, however, is that while technical issues in adding media have certainly had a limiting role, is this all that has kept multimedia from dotting the pages of our favorite collaborative encyclopedia? Can video be collaborative? Sponsor While we wonder about the collaborative nature of the site versus the more fixed nature of video, others have already been hard at work making collaborative video a (potential) reality. We spoke today with Michael Dale, a self-professed "open-video evangelist" for Kaltura , who said that "we haven't really seen yet the collaborative sequencing aspects of the software," but that these tools are currently in development. Kaltura is the online video editing company that is working with Wikimedia to enable video on Wikipedia. Through meta data and other tools, the company is trying to make video a more collaborative media. The " Let's Get Video on Wikipedia " page offers a simple five-step how-to on how to add video to the site, but the only thing we're thinking it's missing is the "wash, rinse, repeat" aspect of adding any content to Wikipedia. While it is rather simple to go in and edit a sentence here and a paragraph there in a text format, editing a video is not nearly as simple. Now videos can be easily uploaded, how will Wikipedia's users contend with the medium? If a three-minute long video is added to an article, but 30 seconds of it contain somewhat disputed ideas, interspersed through out, will these parts simply be cut? Will the whole video be scrapped or will another user take the video, slice those parts out and insert their own? And in the end, if this is the case, what sort of mish-mash multimedia will we end up with in the end? This is the next step, it would seem. "Once there are more tools available," said Dale, "I think we'll see more experimentation." It's not as if these questions are new to the Wikipedia community, as you can read in its proposed guidelines , which suggest that videos will should likely be limited to "snapshot-type", "performance-type" and "tour-type" videos. Even with these limitations, if you've ever looked through the history of changes on Wikipedia articles, then you know how even the finest points of an idea can be discussed and dissected. According to a video interview with Kaltura co-founder Michal Tsur on Beet.TV , "users should be able to use video just the same way they're using text", but a word is a word is a word. A video, even a tiny bit of video, can differ in lighting, sound, angle and any number of other variables. "The actual fact is that we're just getting started," Dale pointed out. "There's not a clear idea of how video will work and be used." In the end, we think video sounds like a great idea, but wonder how widespread it can really become on a platform that holds collaboration in such high esteem. Whether or not video collaboration takes off on Wikipedia, we would love to see what could be created within other contexts (i.e. not encyclopedic) with the collaborative video tools that Dale says are currently in development. Discuss
Link:
Multimedia Wikipedia: Can Video Be Collaborative?
Tags:
collaborative,
collaborative media,
crowdsourcing,
Dale,
easily-uploaded,
even-the-finest,
history,
meta data,
Michael Dale,
online,
site,
tools,
video,
video alliance,
Wikipedia