MobileWorks FAQ

Here is a list of some commonly asked questions:

MobileWorks breaks data into smaller chunks–for example, scanned documents into small images of one word–delivers these micro-tasks to workers on their cell phone, reassembles the results, and sends them back to our clients. We do it with intelligent computational programs that help us to preprocess work, assess the quality of results, and optimize the workflow. MobileWorks’ provides a high accuracy, low-cost and quickly-processed outsourcing solution to corporations. Yes! Using the MobileWorks service, you can easily upload documents and have them digitized. For forms that have the same layout, you can even zip them together and upload them all at once. The MobileWorks digitizer can help. Besides document digitization, MobileWorks can do all sorts of tasks. If you are a developer with some basic coding knowledge, you can use our API to design your own crowdsourcing application to do things like classifying data, tagging images, transcribing audio, making recommendations, analyzing twitter feeds, translating languages, subtitling videos, making smart database queries, proofreading papers, classifying ads, generating sales leads, search for email addresses, filter spam...and more! Yes! You can try one of the applications people have already built using the MobileWorks platform. Here's one we like for pulling data from paper forms. Here's one more that does web research for you. API tasks are are usually completed within 24 hours, and sometimes even within minutes. Prices vary depending on the complexity of tasks and how long it takes workers to complete them. We'll price the task for you after a few workers give it a try so that workers are paid a fair wage for doing the work. You can pay more if you need your job to be done urgently and we'll guarantee that it gets done quickly. The MobileWorks API is very powerful, flexible, and allows you to do a very large variety of tasks. Because there are so many different things you can do with the MobileWorks API, the costs for using the API for these different types of tasks are a bit variable. Pricing is based on how sophisticated each task is and how much time the crowd (real people!) can complete them. Typical tasks, like OCR usually start at 2 cents per task; for image tagging, the prices start around 7 cents; and for advanced web research tasks, costs start at around 10 cents each. A task is a piece of information that each member of the crowd is given to complete. For an advanced web scraping task, one task is equal to finding out one piece of information from one website url. For web scraping, finding an email on a webpage is a task; for image tagging tasks, tagging one image is considered a task; and so on. Well, if you ask things from common categories of questions (OCR, image tagging, web research, and audio transcription), we'll guarantee it: we've baked it into the system. If you want to try your own tasks, workers will do their best to give you correct answers. If workers get confused by what you're asking them to do, they'll ask you and each other for help and advice. Yes. Actually, it's the opposite! The reason we created MobileWorks was to make a socially responsible way to give high-tech work to people in rural villages and slums in the developing world. All the folks working in our system are paid fair wages and use MobileWorks to make better lives for themselves. By using MobileWorks, you're actually making the world a better place. It's both! It's simper to use, more accurate, AND it helps fight poverty. Neat, huh?