CloudCrowd is trying to bring labour into the cloud by utilising a vast network of workers across the world in a way similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower. So far CloudCrowd has 25,000 individual workers who at this early stage already completed over a million tasks since the site’s launch in October 2009.
The start-up has now raised a second round of $5.1 million in funding, having already raised $1.5 million. The latest round of funding involves DFJ as well as the start-up’s founder and CEO Alex Edelstein.
Most of the work completed on CloudCrowd is driven by client tasks where a company requests a task to be completed to CloudCrowd which then farms out the job to workers that are eligible. As with Amazon’s service the tasks can be as simple as examining the quality of an image or as advanced as translating entire web pages.
When a task is completed a different user checks the work to give an additional level of quality control. Completed tasks earn workers a credibility rating: as a worker builds their credibility rating they are assigned increasingly complex tasks.
The company also has a business that carries out work for consumers. The site, called EditZen, allows users to submit pages to be edited for $4 per page and the company plans to launch TranslationZen soon.
With two major established competitors in the market CloudCrowd will need to offer a substantially attractive service but, as this market is still expanding, CloudCrowd definitely has a lot of room to grow.
