Twitter has just upgraded the machinery behind its search, this time with added real-time human computation!

Since machines are terrible at things like irony and instantly forming new associations and contexts between seemingly unrelated terms (e.g., “binders of women” and “presidential debate”), the company’s brilliant engineers have decided to call in the big guns: Actual. People.

Although the prevailing wisdom would have it that we meatbags are ridiculously underpowered in the computational power category, Twitter devs Edwin Chen and Alpa Jain write this morning on the company’s engineering blog that meatbags will be used to create annotations for newly trending search terms.

From the blog:

First, we monitor for which search queries are currently popular. Behind the scenes: we run a Storm* topology that tracks statistics on search queries. … As soon as we discover a new popular search query, we send it to our human evaluators, who are asked a variety of questions about the query [via a custom pool of specialized workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk service]. … Finally, after a response from an evaluator is received, we push the information to our backend systems, so that the next time a user searches for a query, our machine learning models will make use of the additional information. For example, suppose our evaluators tell us that [Big Bird] is related to politics; the next time someone performs this search, we know to surface ads by @barackobama or @mittromney, not ads about Dora the Explorer.”

* Storm is Twitter’s trend-spotting software that quickly identifies spikes in search queries as they occur. You can check it out on GitHub if that sounds interesting to you. Storm, an open-source project, was built at BackType, which Twitter acquired.

Twitter says it uses the meatbag method for other tasks and also focuses on making its machine learning better with human input. For those worried about the quality of said input, Twitter assures the public that only the finest of Mechanical Turk workers are being tapped to handle these kinds of tasks. As the blog notes, “Having highly trusted workers means we don’t need to wait for multiple annotations on a single search query to confirm validity, so we can send responses to our backend as soon as a single judge responds. This entire pipeline is designed for real-time, after all, so the lower the latency on the human evaluation part, the better.”

If all that up there was too wordy for ya, here’s the news in singing telegram form:

Image credit: Shutterstock

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Most companies use at least 4 different cloud services, according to a study by Cloudability, proof that the cloud has become a ubiquitous tool, whether chief information officers want it to be or not.

Cloudability (a provider of cost-management tools for cloud services) looked at data from its 3,200 customers in 80 different countries to gather this information that reaches back to 2005 — a time before “cloud” became a mainstream term for sharing and storage on the Internet. Today, companies are spending thousands of dollars to keep up with the technology, replacing on-premiss systems like customer-relationship management software and even local servers in favor of the Internet. Looking at the data, cloud really hockey-sticked in 2010. Prior to that, however, there were a few prominent cloud services: For instance, Mechanical Turk was released in 2005, Google Apps in 2006, and Github in 2008.

Today, 86 percent of companies use more than one type of cloud service, according to Cloudability’s data. The majority of those cloud services fall in the “hosting and computing category,” followed closely by storage needs. The data is surprising because of reservations that CIOs and chief security officers have about the cloud. Many are concerned that the cloud is not yet a safe place to store proprietary information, and could provide access to a company’s systems more easily. But as the technology evolves, more companies are jumping on board, solidifying the cloud as a core tool in businesses around the world.

Check out more about the cloud and how it is being used by companies all over the world:

Cloud server image via Shutterstock

Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s army of pieceworkers, ready to help you blend computation with human tasks in web apps.

What I didn’t know is that MTurk is also a powerful tool for testing and refining ideas. I learned this while interviewing Dan Shapiro onstage at the Founder Showcase last week.

Shapiro is a remarkably successful entrepreneur. His second startup, Sparkbuy, was acquired by Google just six months after he launched it.

That’s after a successful go with his first startup, Ontela, which merged with Photobucket in 2009. That company took a relatively pokey four years to arrive at an exit. Of course, by most people’s standards, four years would be plenty fast.

But what makes Shapiro’s approach to starting companies so interesting is the thorough, pragmatic approach he takes to market testing.

“I’m always skeptical when I get too in love with an idea,” Shapiro told me.

So when he had an idea for making it easier to find and compare electronics on e-commerce sites, he turned to Mechanical Turk to test and refine the plan.

(It also helped that a Google business development executive he met on a plane expressed interest in the idea, but “that was just a tiny, positive indicator in the grand scheme of things,” Shapiro said.)

Mechanical Turk, a project Amazon.com started in 2005, is a brilliant fusion of human labor and programmatic computation. Using it, you can incorporate human effort into your web-based software simply by making an API call. It’s no surprise that entrepreneurs are excited about using MTurk as a low-cost way of recruiting help, particularly for repetitive tasks.

But it’s also a great, low-cost tool for doing surveys, and that’s exactly what Shapiro did.

The first part of his surveys is always the set of eight questions from the U.S. Census. That helps him determine demographics and figure out how “normal” his respondents are.

Then he follows up by asking them a ton of questions.

First, Shapiro asked 100 people to describe a laptop as if their friend was going to buy it for them. Then he analyzed the responses, categorized all the words they used, and did a second survey to measure how important each of those words were. After that, he did follow-up interviews.

What Shapiro found was that the #1 criterion for laptop shoppers was price (no surprise there). But the #2 criterion was quantity of RAM, which was a bit surprising because it is an unusually geeky metric. Who really cares how much RAM their notebook has, after all, except really techie people? After doing some interviews, he realized that what people really wanted was speed, but there was no way on electronics sites to specify “I want a laptop that’s fast enough to run PhotoShop.”

Using these answers from a series of surveys, Shapiro was able to craft a business plan for a company that would let you shop for laptops based on criteria people actually care about, such as the ability to run PhotoShop, or weight, or color. What’s more, he knew from his market research that these were the criteria customers would be most likely to respond to, so his business idea was essentially pre-tested.

“I love MTurk,” Shapiro said.

He also used MTurk in the course of business, not just for business plan testing. For example, Sparkbuy’s database of laptop attributes was built in part by an army of “Turkers.” And at Ontela, he’d put out surveys with 100 or more questions about the wireless industry, using them as a valuable market research tool.

The price is almost ridiculously low. Shapiro said he would pay about 26 cents apiece for people to answer these 100-question surveys.

Shapiro’s not a solitary genius — others, particularly academics, have discovered the value of using MTurk in research. In 2009, someone named Alex Frakking described in detail how he used Mechanical Turk for conducting surveys. He paid a bit more: about 3 cents per survey question, in an attempt to keep the hourly rate between $8 and $12.

Frakking makes an interesting point, which is that the very people who fill out your survey on MTurk might turn into some of your earliest customers. You can make that easier by letting them opt-in to a mailing list so you can contact them when you launch. “In the last big survey I did, about 20 percent of respondents gave their email for just that purpose, meaning the survey can pay for itself in leads,” Frakking concludes.

Are Mechanical Turk surveys statistically valid? Absolutely — or at least as valid as phone or website surveys.

“The funny thing is,” Shapiro told me onstage, “if you actually look at the methodologies behind the way everyone else does it, it’s just the same.”

In a 2010 study, researchers compared surveys done with MTurk to those done using the traditional sociological pool, Midwestern university students, and with people found on Internet discussion boards. MTurk compared favorably.

The study concluded “experimenters should consider Mechanical Turk as a viable alternative for data collection,” although it warned that subjects are susceptible to the same kinds of experimental bias found in other arenas. The takeaway: Design your surveys carefully.

Also, the authors warn, unlike undergraduates, MTurk workers aren’t replaced with a new crop every few years, so there’s the potential for long-term relationships between surveyers and those surveyed. So don’t be a jerk: Treat your survey respondents right and they’ll be there for you, potentially for years.

For people who are interested in following Shapiro’s lead, there’s an open-source set of tools for doing MTurk surveys, called Lime Survey. And IT World published a detailed list of tips on running experiments or surveys on MTurk.

The rest of my discussion with Shapiro covered topics such as who should raise venture capital (not everyone), his experiences selling Sparkbuy and merging Ontela and Photobucket, and his thoughts on crowdfunding. It’s worth a listen. The whole 30-minute interview is below.

Mechanical Turk image: Wikipedia

With Humanoid developers can harness the strength of crowd-sourcing and get accurate results, not currently available from existing solutions such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, where people around the world can complete small tasks for payment, or outsourcing hubs like oDesk or Elance. Imagine a 20,000-person workforce at your fingertips completing tasks for $4.99 per hour.

Humanoid founder Matt Mireles wanted to build the API to solve a problem he ran into at his video-transcription company, SpeakerText. ”We launched SpeakerText, and it took us about a year and a half to get actual quality results from Mechanical Turk,” Mireles told VentureBeat. The problem, Mireles said, is that it was extremely difficult to ensure the quality of an anonymous, distributed workforce. For every dollar the team spent on labor on Mechanical Turk, it had to spend two dollars on quality assurance and cleanup. Everyone is trying to game the system, because there’s no accountability.

“Mechanical Turk is a marketplace with no sheriff,” Mireles said.

Humanoid operates like a good boss and does what bosses have done since the beginning of time, Mireles said. When someone is new, the boss pays closer attention to them and ensures that they’re producing quality work. As the quality improves, there is less need for scrutiny, and the employee can operate with more autonomy. This has never been possible before, because there wasn’t a software program focused on assuring quality.

“Businesses demand accuracy, and quality, but they can’t get it, because they have to manage the teams themselves,” Mireles said. In the case of SpeakerText, that meant hiring people to manage the quality of the work produced by the teams doing jobs from Mechanical Turk, a problem that is remarkarkably widespread.

Using statistics to predict how accurately a task will be completed based on a worker’s past performance, Humanoid is able to judge whether a worker is showing signs of fatigue, or if other factors could be interfering with the completion of a task. When these warning signs arise, the job is rerouted to another distributed worker who can meet the company’s standards, so no time is lost fixing work that is not up to snuff.

SpeakerText will live on as a feature of Humanoid and will continue to serve existing customers as needed. Mireles and team previously received funding from Mitch Kapor  and 500 Startups for SpeakerText. Humanoid has received funding from Google Ventures.

Whether you are starting a new company or are just the laziest CEO ever, there’s great news for you — the explosion in crowdsourcing strategies and solutions means you might be able to get started without any full-time employees! If you have projects or jobs that need to be completed quickly and inexpensively, here are some tips for getting the crowd to do your heavy lifting:

1. You need a name for your business. One iPhone developer put the task of naming his e-reader out to the crowd through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and $27.50 and 500 responses later came up with the name iReadFast. That’s even cheaper than the Silicon Valley tradition of getting a few friends together with a few cases of beer before godaddy.com crushes your dreams.
2. Now your great new name needs an eye-catching logo. 99 Designs helps companies crowdsource graphic design work to a broad network of artists and designers who compete to submit the best idea. You offer a payment price for the best logo, then pick the one you like best from the submissions.
3. Once you cover those basics, you probably need lots of money. Immediately. Crowdsource your funding with Kickstarter, a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers and more. You name the amount of money you need to do something; people in turn pledge amounts in support of this project or business. If you receive enough pledges, your donors’ payments are processesed and you receive the full amount. You can incentivize your crowdfunders in creative ways with items like t-shirts, books, etc.
4. In the digital age, you will probably need code development or programming. TopCoder claims to have been crowdsourcing since 2001, before there was a name for this phenomenon. It runs competitions with prizes that enable participants to compete for the best software, development and employment services solutions. To make an amazing webpage, oDesk can connect you with a web developer (or any other sort of freelancer you may seek). Its tools enable you to view progress on the project as work is completed.
5. No product will be successful without customers – and that means marketing. Go to Trada, a search engine marketing and optimization company that lets the crowd pick the best keywords for your company or campaign.
6. With your website and your AdWords account, you have a solid online presence. Find leads in the industries you are targeting with Jigsaw (recently acquired by Salesforce.com). It lets people upload contact information in exchange for the ability to download other people’s contact information. If you want all the phone numbers of all the execs, there’s a way to make it happen. Jigsaw has what it claims to be the world’s largest database of contact information.
7. Now that you have these leads, it’s time to take a good look in the mirror and decide whether or not you really want to call them all. Chances are you don’t, which is right about when you want to visit LiveOps. The company specializes in call center outsourcing where you can set the script that you want “your” sales people to use. It has thousands of people (many of whom are stay at home mothers) in the United States who make the calls from their own homes.
8. In the inevitable event that your customers get angry, use Get Satisfaction, where they can help each other. Get Satisfaction gives your customers a place to ask questions and voice complaints about your product. Often, your customer is the best person to respond to an issue another customer is having.
9. Now that you have a healthy business you need to make sure that you invest in R&D to stay ahead of the competition. This is the point at which you want to visit InnoCentive, a company that allows you to outsource research and development of any kind. It lets you set bounties for the discovery of new things. This could range from a new compression algorithm to a new drug.
10. By now you are undoubtedly big enough and prosperous enough to have your own corporate social responsibility efforts. Samasource lets you send microtasks to youth, refugees and women in developing countries. Your rich friends who are iPhone/iPad users can support this via GiveWork (iTunes link), an app developed with CrowdFlower that allows users to donate their time to charity by double checking the work done by Samasource workers.

Crowdsourcing isn’t just a buzzword –- it’s an effective way for companies to get started fast and iterate quickly with less overhead. All of these companies offer a service with less upfront commitment than traditional outsourcing -– and that advantage really shines when it comes to early stage companies.