| Industry | crowdsourcing |
|---|---|
| Founded | December, 2007 |
| Founder(s) | Lukas Biewald and Chris Van Pelt |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, USA |
| Website | http://crowdflower.com/ |
CrowdFlower was founded in 2007 by Lukas Biewald[1] to create tools to manage internet crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is ideal for large-scale, repetitive yet hard to automate tasks which require an always-on, scalable workforce to rapidly complete. Over 250 million tasks have been completed through the CrowdFlower platform.
To demonstrate the power of crowdsourcing, CrowdFlower created facestat[2], to show how a simple task can be quickly outsourced around the world.
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CrowdSifter for content moderation tasks like tagging nude images or obscenities.
CrowdFlower, is a general-purpose crowdsourcing app that allows customers to upload their own tasks to be carried out by users of labor channels such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, TrialPay, and Samasource (a social entreprise that connects women, youth, and refugees in the poorest parts of the world to microwork). Small payments are paid per completed tasks, typically a few cents per task. CrowdFlower was nominated for the TechCrunch50 in September, 2009.
CrowdFlower was founded as "Dolores Labs" in 2007 by Lukas Biewald—former member of Yahoo!'s search relevance team and the senior scientist of the ranking and metrics team at Powerset (acquired by Microsoft) — and Chris Van Pelt, a web engineer. The founding investor was Gary Kremen, the founder of Match.com and sex.com.
After the 2010 Haiti earthquake CrowdFlower's technology made it possible to route thousands of text messages to the proper aid workers, to get them translated quickly, and to ensure that the people sending the texts had the best chance of getting what they needed. Once CrowdFlower's technology was implemented, the average time to translate, map, geocode, and categorize a text fell to less than two minutes.