Making distributed work viable through "microtasking"
In addition to their personal investments, the Lots partners
also put plenty of sweat equity into portfolio companies. Lots
partner
Ville Miettinen also serves as the
CEO of Microtask, an innovative company that is
using complex software engineering techniques to break down long,
laborious and repetitive work processes into simple and rapid
microtasks that can be "crowdsourced" via the internet to
distributed workers located anywhere in the world.
"We're starting by working with simple text recognition tasks,
which might be needed for digitizing archives or processing
handwritten forms such as insurance claims - but later there's
plenty of potential for microtasking other work such as speech
recognition and image interpretation," explains Miettinen.
Microtasking systems include automatic quality control checks.
Initially distributed workers are likely to be people such as call
centre staff in low-cost countries who will be sent microtasks
through their employers, but microwork could soon create completely
new kinds of employment and earning opportunities for people in
developing countries.
In February 2011 Microtask launched a pilot project together with
the Finnish National Library through which anyone may help to
create an extensive national digital archives by transcribing scans
of old documents. Contributors will carry out their microtasks on a
voluntary basis, largely for the satisfaction of helping to compile
this Finnish heritage, but Microtask have also created game-like
activities incorporating the tasks to make them more enjoyable.
Miettinen believes that microtasks could eventually be creatively
incorporated into social networks and games, perhaps as an
alternative way to pay for virtual goods.
"At the moment the global market for business outsourcing amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and we reckon a considerable slice of this could be done through distributed work using Microtask technology, relieving companies of the need to have highly paid staff doing time-consuming menial tasks," says Miettinen. "We're already open for business, and we next need to expand our global sales operations before looking at more new applications and markets. We're pleased to have the leading Nordic VC investors Sunstone Capital on board, but we're still looking to bring in other VCs." Miettinen emphasises that even though prices per microtask unit will only be fractions of a penny, the scope for distributed workers to do billions of microtasks per day make microtasking a potentially huge business.