Crowdflower, a startup that helps other companies outsource tasks to crowdsourced labor services like Gambit and Amazon Mechanical Turk, announced today that it released its application programming interface (API) to allow third-party developers to build on top of this framework. It also says it has partnered with TrialPay, an online payment platform that offers unique fee options known as offers, which are special ads.
TrialPay is unique because it allows people to pay for one thing while they are buying another. For example, you could get a free trial for an application if you take advantage of a discount at another retailer. More relevant to Crowdflower, the TrialPay deal might allow crowdsourced workers to earn Facebook Credits for their work instead of cash. The company says this option might appeal to younger social gamers who would prefer to work for credits. Yes, that's right. People are willing to be paid virtual money for real work.
The API released today should spread Crowdflower’s presence in the virtual labor market throughout the web -- at least that’s the plan. The idea is to give publishers the tools they need to list the tasks they need crowdsourced workers for on their own sites and applications. Crowdflower will remain the middle man, keeping track of jobs and ratings, and notifying users when milestones have been reached.
In addition to these two announcements, the company also threw out a future goal: to adopt a social login like the Facebook Login plugin, that would allow the company to keep better tabs on workers and their performances. The plan would eventually be to provide more precise reputation scores for employers to peruse.
Based in San Francisco, Crowdflower has raised $6.2 million to date from a host of investors, including Freestyle Capital, K9 Ventures, Quest Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures and a handful of angels.