Random issues, opinions and views

Bridging economics through the internet

2009-03-10T00:28:00.000-07:00

Many jobs or tasks can be done online by freelancers. Basically, the same task or job can be done by someone living in the US, Europe, India, China or any other country. The main advantage of outsourcing work to people in countries like India, China and other developing countries is clear, low cost work power.

But there are other advantages, for example certain HIT (human intelligence tasks) aren’t worth doing by people living in US or other developed countries, because these are simple tasks which may take a few minutes to complete and the payment for those is as low as a few cents . But people in India may find it worthwhile, that’s the idea behind Amazon Mechanical Turk.

I came across an interesting article explaining the economics of CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart — a program used to discern computers from humans. Usually an image containing a numerical or alphabetic code that can normally only be read and interpreted by a human)

"The economics are as follows: 300-500 CAPTCHAs per person per hour. The clients pay between $9-15 per 1000 CAPTCHAs solved. The team works around 12 hours a day per person. That means they can solve somewhere around 4800 CAPTCHAs per day per person, and depending on how hard the CAPTCHAs are that can run you around $50 per day per person (his estimate). The reason it’s not higher is because they take breaks, and fail sometimes."

The funny thing is that on the comments, people where offering captcha solving even at $2 -$3 per 1000 CAPTCHAs.

Everything you wanted to know about google

2008-12-04T05:00:00.001-08:00

Very interesting presentation (a bit pro-google) but I believe it very much reflects Google's strategy.

All about Google

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: google about)

Voiceminder - sending yourself a reminder

2008-07-05T02:12:00.000-07:00

Voiceminder (recently re-named Note2Self) from webis is a mobile app that lets you record a voice note and then sends it to your inbox via email . I've been using this app on a windows mobile device for a few months now and I find it really time-saving and useful. Sometimes I have an idea or think of something I have to do, while driving or walking and instead of writing reminders on my mobile (which my wife finds pretty annoying :)) I only have to press two buttons: start/stop. No user interface, just a user-configured hotkey to start recording then the hotkey again to stop & send. Later on, the next time I sit in front of my email I just listen and decide what to do with it. The voice notes are compressed so you can send yourself very light files with long messages. Easy, fast and time saving.

Juggling and Balls

2008-06-26T15:15:00.000-07:00

Check out this video, be patient and watch till the end, it gets better and better…
It made me think of life. We spend most of our life juggling. We constantly juggle between family, friends, work, bills, news, hobbies etc.
The guy on this video (Chris Bliss) has an incredible ability to focus on juggling, he masters the art of juggling.
In life, we must also master juggling but the real focus should be on each ball (the people we love, our needs, our dreams...).
I'm taking another ball today, this blog. So I welcome you and I hope you'll enjoy.
Remember, watch till the end the better part starts after 2:10 mins.