My friends often ask me, what do engineers at CloudFactory do to wind up when they get tired of hacking? Well, they go for hiking, sometime bungee jump and sometime movie. Wait, they do lot more than hiking, they are fond of flying in the clouds too. Literally. Here is what we did in our last trip to Pokhara.

Our planned annual team-building trip to Jiri got postponed at the last moment on December last year because of the blockades on the highway.  That was a bad experience for us, however we rescheduled our team-building trip to Pokhara on first week of April after four months.

On 5th April, the CloudFactory family left CloudFactory complex at 7:45 am in a Tourist bus for our annual team-building trip to Pokhara. We picked our remaining CloudFactory members on the way.  Passing through the hilly roads, after 3 hours of a long ride along Prithvi Highway, we stopped in Malekhu for an hour and had Lunch in ‘The Blue Heaven Restaurant, Benighat’ sitting by the bank of Trisuli River. 

After having lunch and some cold drinks, we left Malekhu at 11:30am. It was already 12:30 pm when we crossed the Mugling Bridge. We stopped again in Ghasikuwa at 1:45pm for half an hour and had cold drinks though that restaurant charged us ridiculously; they’d overpriced their each item in their restaurant and sadly we’d no option other than paying them. Passing by Damauli at 2:30 pm, we reached our hotel ‘Taj’ in Lakeside Pokhara at 4:15pm.  Pokhara is situated about 200 km west of the capital Kathmandu and is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Nepal. It was raining when we reached our hotel. Hotel Taj welcomed us with a cup of hot coffee and sandwich. 

In the evening Mark and Tom briefed about the CloudFactory and its vision and mission once again. Mark and Tom also presented the roadmap of CloudFactory for upcoming months and years.  Since, the purpose of CloudFactory is to connect 1 million people in the developing world to basic computer work and raise them up as leaders to address poverty in their own communities. We discussed the various ideas, goals and our responsibility.  Buffet was opened for dinner at 8:00pm. We went to bed at midnight after roaming around Lakeside for some hours.

The next morning a few of us woke up at 5 so that we could get to Sarangkot just in time to see the Sun rise. After having a sumptuous breakfast at 8:00am, we attended another session by Sunil, Evan and Sharan, in which they talked about Poverty, 10-F Assessment and CloudFactory Values respectively followed by the team building activities. 

The real fun began when CloudFactory engineers, who are accustomed to hacking together things in Ruby and Rails day in day out, were handed paintbrush and a canvas to paint a picture that best represented the vision of CloudFactory. 

After having lunch at noon, we visited the Powerhouse. Along with swimming we also collected garbage from that river. Back in hotel we’d bonfire in the evening followed by barbecue and musical program. 

The next day was Saturday and it turned out to be the most adventurous day for us. After having breakfast we set out for paragliding, flew from Sarangkot and landed nearby the side of Phewa lake after doing some acrobatics in the air. An adventurous sport, paragliding was the breathtaking experience for us, we flew almost half an hour over the Phewa Lake before landing. One of the CloudFactory engineers Ashis Rai recalls paragliding as mind-blowing experience. He says, “Never thought that paragliding experience could be that much fun.  I was flying with one of the most experienced paraglider from Australia, Tom who was in this profession since last two decades. The most dangerous moment was acrobats i.e. 360 degree round. This acrobat was triggered when we saw another guy doing it, which was just above the Phewa Lake, 1500m high.” 

The next morning, on Sunday after having breakfast we left Hotel Taj at 9:00am.  We crossed Mugling Bridge at 11:40 am and then stopped in Malekhu at 12:30pm for lunch for an hour. We arrived our Office in Bhaisepati at 4:30pm. 

For more photo, check out CloudFactory Facebook Page.

Recently, Paul Graham wrote a piece on what he called frighteningly ambitious ideas. These are very daring startup ideas with the potential to be hugely successful in terms of the impact they can have and/or the money they can rake in for their founders. However, says Paul, gargantuan effort required to execute the idea prevents entrepreneurs from tackling them and investors from funding them. Paul lists everything from building a better search engine to replacing universities to changing the way entertainment and healthcare is delivered in his list of these frighteningly ambitious ideas.

In the light of all this, allow me to present you the granddaddy of all frighteningly ambitious ideas that we have been working on for a while.  

Using technology to connect one million people in the developing world to basic computer work while raising them up as leaders to address poverty in their own communities.

With this vision, we are striking right at the heart of the problems that have been plaguing some of the poorest regions of the world for centuries – poverty, illiteracy, and absence of any opportunity whatsoever for pursuit of happiness. Trillions of dollars have flowed over the decades into these regions in the form of monetary aids but much of it has been in vain.

We aim to change that. And we regard it as a frighteningly ambitious idea because we are trying to use technology to solve one of the most complex, thorniest, and longest problems in the history of mankind.

Here is our secret sauce for achieving this:

Platform
Create a platform that breaks down large digital projects into tiny tasks that any literate person with basic computer skills can complete in a few, easy steps.

People
Dole out these tasks to an army of one million people in developing countries. The massive parallelization of tasks made possible by this results in faster and scalable completion of projects resulting in significant value to businesses in developed economies. At the same time, the people will have a way to engage themselves in meaningful work.

Prosperity
People would get paid for their efforts allowing them to make a living for themselves. Additionally, our unique growth model would also enable them to receive education and training to become leaders in their own community, excel in life, and enjoy prosperity.

Sounds a bit idealistic and naïve right?

Well, we have been hacking away for the last two years in Rails ( and a bunch of other cool technologies including MongoDB and Redis) and have a working platform now being used by early customers. We are testing it with a growing group of people from Nepal (and Nepal is where we are based) we call cloud workers (and we are thrilled by the quality of results we are getting). And, finally we have seen demonstrable proof of transformation in the lives of our cloud workers after joining CloudFactory, thus validating our third point too.

The bigger challenge begins now – to scale this model to 1 million people. We will be glad to share every bit of this experience with you. What would you like to know?

What does it look like to make history? Are their bands and movie cameras to mark the occasion? Most of these milestone events slip past our view only to be seen more clearly in our rearview mirrors as one speeds through life. These past weeks at CloudFactory history is being made for Nepal. It looks like this.

What began as a simple survey to gauge interest in the opportunity to do virtual work quickly turned into an interview process that attracted over 400 applicants.

Our goal was to find some of the best and brightest in Nepal and train them on our newly released platform for completing microwork tasks.
Seek and you shall find is how the old saying goes. We were amazed at the level of talent and excitement we discovered in this process. In fact, on our initial survey prospective candidates scolded us for not promoting the opportunity more intensely. “People need to hear about these opportunities!”

What do interviews look like when you are social enterprise? We believe they should have a level of excellence but also be personable and relational enough to encourage those who are not selected. One candidate described that in her own blog post after the interview week.

“I was fascinated with working environment there at CloudFactory, I was even more excited about the whole place (Awash Bhaisepati) You guys should visit it if possible coz its so peaceful with organized town planning, beautiful hills and surprisingly clean and green :).” Manika  

After several rounds of testing and the final interview process we painstakingly choose our final 25 pioneers.

The first week of orientation was not without its trials. Unveiling a new way to do work is bound to have some roadbumps along the way. Tuesday morning the office was a whirlwind of excited candidates and anxious developers hoping, praying that their years of work would pay off. It absolutely did. Within 24 hours, the first 2 groups of candidates were making great headway towards their predetermined limits for this trial. How did they do?

“We’ve manually checked around 30% of the first completed tasks and all of them are perfect. Awesome!!.”                                                -Sarwagya Pandey Solutions Manager

You shouldn’t take our word alone. Look at some of the responses from these pioneers of CloudFactory.

It makes a massive difference. I am a student in 3rd year of Law Degree. I wouldn't say that my parents will not be able to afford my fees, however many additional expenses, besides colleges, for eg. moot courts and conferences and trainings require certain amount of money, which I hope to earn via this project. These trainings and additional activities are vital for my future career too. Moreover, one needs to start becoming capable, and it is a process which I think begins for me from this work.

- CloudWorker Trainee

"I get very less pocket money from my parents, so yes, it'll definitely make a 'substantial' difference in my life. I may do some professional trainings with the money, like webpage designing, personality development workshops, etc. and I genuinely wish to buy my younger brother a drum kit, so that he can also teach me how to play :-)"

-CloudWorker Trainee

Meet the CloudFactory Cloud Workers

After an unforgettable trip to Bandipur in last November, the CloudFactory’s social committee once again organized a 2 days hike to Sailung on first week of March.

On Saturday morning of 3rd March, the 12 CloudFactory hikers left CloudFactory complex at 7:30am for 2 days Sailung hike. We picked our remaining 4 members on the way. After 4 hours of long microbus ride along Arniko Highway, we reached Mude around 11:30am and had lunch in a local restaurant.

After having a lunch and buying some snacks, water bottles and chocolates in Mude, we started our hike to Sailung around 12:30pm. We’d planned to take our Microbus to Chaichap, a base of Sailung Mountain but it didn’t went according to our plan. Because of the poor condition of the road, we’d to walk from Mude, leaving our Microbus and Driver dai in Mude. We’d also missed local bus to Chaichap, thus there’s no option rather than walking.

Firstly, we’re disappointed because we’d to walk more than 6 hours to reach the top of Sailung. But as we hiked forward, the beautiful scenery pleased us, though the road was dusty. Moreover, we met one NEA personnel on our way, who’s also going to Dhunge Bajar for his official work. He asked us to take shortcut instead of walking along the road, thus we took shortcut from Deurali and within half an hour we reached Baghkhor from Deurali. We took rest in Baghkhor for a while and then started our hike again. As we climbed the uphill from Baghkhor, we saw Sailung at distant and, once we all thought we couldn’t reach there that day.

Passing by the dense forest, we reached Dhunge Bajar at 4:00pm. There, we stayed in a near by hotel for snacks. At 4:45pm we left Dhunge Bajar for Sailung, and it was the most difficult trail for us to climb up. We hardly walk along the uphill; we used to walk for 10 minutes and then take rest for 3 minutes. As we climbed up, it was getting cold & we’d already given farewell to the Sun as well for that day.

We reached Kalapani at 5:50pm and asked locals whether we could make it to the top or not? They encouraged us saying, “You can make it, and it’s just a 30 min walk from here”. We believed them and continued our hike under the half-full-moon but we could not make it, instead it took more than 1 hour.

We reached the top at 7:00pm, and by the time we’re worried, since we’re not following any trail, we’re just climbing the uphill. Once we thought we'd lost our path and even we thought we’d to stay whole night under the sky. Oh, it’s freezing cold!

Finally we figured out the trail near from that giant rock. We steep downhill and finally reached Kholakharka at 7:20pm. There were few motels in Kholakharka. We stayed at one of the motels of an old lady. She cooked, rice, daal and local khukura for us in a firewood, and we sat besides the fire. Some of our friends were having headache, thus we asked her for medicine. To our surprise, she said they do not have medicine since they do not need any kind of medicine there. She also told that, people wouldn’t get sick there in Sailung area, this fresh air & cool weather is enough to keep ones healthy. We went to bed at around 10:00pm, near by a next house, which was specially designed for guests and trekkers.

The next morning, we woke up at 5:20am and set out for Sailung at 5:40am to see the Sun rise. After 30 min walk from Kholakharka, we finally reached Sailung at 6:10 am that is situated at 3146m above the sea level. At the top there’re small hills, thus it has been named as Sailung. We saw the rising sun and took some photos, and had black ginger tea there. Well, I can’t explain that moment here in words, that moment was just awesome. That majestic view of Sailung, which were covered with dew, cool breeze, and those Buddhist flags and Sailung Mahadev (Hindu Goddess), just awesome! Moreover drinking black ginger tea at 3146 m, wooo! That’s somekinda cool thing, ever I’d done in my life. However, unfortunately we were not able to see beautiful Himalayas clearly due to fog.

At 7:00 am, we left Sailung and headed down for Chaichap since we’d to catch a bus. We reached Chaichap around 9:00am and had breakfast; and then we boarded a bus from Chaichap at 10:00am and reached Mude at 12:00pm. After having a lunch in Mude, we returned back to Kathmandu! On the way, we stopped by in Dolalghat and had snacks. Overall, it’s a memorable and adventurous trip.

Here is what our CloudFactory Engineers had to say about their experience:

Dipesh Gautam: I don't think there was much to enjoy in the scenery but it is impossible to forget the experience. It was very challenging, far from what we had expected it to be. I remember how silently the night came upon us as we were climbing up the hill and then everything became so different. Hope to have such hikes again :)

Lujaw Shrestha: It was hike of a lifetime. More of like a Bootcamp with backpacks, 8+4 hrs of marching, mostly uphill. But the rewards of seeing the majestic view made it all worthwhile and as a bonus now have legs of steel.:)

Prasvin Pandey: Was nearly exhausted before dusk, then had to endure 2 hours more of uphill walk in moonlight and finally peace of mind - but, yea, more exciting and challenging than anticipated. After walking a couple of hours in moonlight and just when we thought we wouldn't be reaching 'KholaKharka' soon enough, I'd made up my mind, that we need to spend the night up there itself, some place where we'd be protected from the wind, by lighting up a fire and cuddling around it :)

For more photos, please check our CloudFactory page on Facebook.

Apps like Bump or My Name is E are great when people have them, but the reality of many is that they get business cards exchanged every week and sometimes every day. To make turning those cards into contacts in your phone, you can find lots of business card reader apps on your iPhone or Android but all of them are not created equally. Here's a quick showdown of a few.

Test 1: Super Easy Card

	BizcardArmy	ABBYY Reader	CamCard	ScanBizCards	Evernote
Company Name	dioxyportfolio	dioxyportfolio	-	dioxypoMolio	**
First Name	Merijn	Mehjn	Merljn	MU)o
Last Name	Hoogeveen	Hoogeveen	Hoogeveen	Noogeveen
Work Phone	255 255 255	255 155 255	255255255	-
Mobile Phone	255 255 255	25525525	255255255	-
Email	info@dioxyportfolio.com	info@dioKyportfolB.com	info@dioxyportfolio.com	-
Title/Role	Graphic Designer	Graptic Designer	-	-
Web URL	www.dioxyportfolio.com	wwwdkHyporTfoEio^om	-	-

Test 2: Handwriting Style Card

(because not all cards are specifically designed to be super easy for scanners)

	BizcardArmy	ABBYY Reader	CamCard	ScanBizCards	Evernote
First Name	John	-	Acct	-	**
Last Name	Smith	-	Mahager	-
Work Phone	(125)653-8971	025)653-697	125653,,897	-
Email	jsmith@abc-inc.com	-	-	pclw@abc-in.com
Title/Role	Acct Manager	-	-	-_Acc'c Manage.r_-
Web URL	www.abc-inc.com	-	-	www.abc-mc.com
Address	123 Pine Tree Court ,suite E	f25 P^e Tree CourtSuite ^	(23 Pine Tree Coc+rt, Suite E	-123 Pine T-Fc.TeTCourf, Suife.F7
	Springfield	j.^m^fi&VJL 0(035-	Springfield	m.b9E..'_el.c1,JJ.2l_o.:.5
	IL	-	IL	((rZ5>eSr.-@974
	01035	-	01035	-

** Evernote cannot determine any individual field or even text. It comes up with multiple possibilities for lots of pieces of text on image but can't tell you where it's pulling a company name from or even if the text it pulled was dioxyportfolio, dioxypoMolio, or blank.

BizcardArmy is a mobile/web app to let users just take a snapshots of their piles of business cards and have them turned into contacts in their phone, email system, or wherever they want these like LinkedIn or Salesforce.

BizcardArmy created contacts are hand-completed by real people so are actually usable! Just check out the findings -- even on an easy card, the next best competitor peaked at getting only 50% of the fields correct. 50%!  And then with just a slightly more difficult card, while many of the others dropped to close to 0% correct, BizcardArmy was 100% accurate!

OCR engines (the term for what BizcardArmy competitors use) employ misleading sales tactics for these quality measures and will tout figures close to, "We're over 90% accurate!" But when that's measured on a character-by-character level, how useful is a 10-digit phone number that got 9 of the 10 digits correct?

So what's BizcardArmy's secret sauce?  CloudFactory!

With CloudFactory, BizcardArmy has a scalable group of human workers they access on-demand that are transcribing the cards and just pay-as-they-go. CloudFactory gives them an API to access these workers seemlessly within their own app and build quality assurance features to ensure their users are getting the quality they need.

P.S. Someone once asked me how I thought BizcardArmy competed with an app like Evernote Business Card Manager which we both agree has great ability to search for text on images. My reply is that there is a reason in Evernote's app, that you still have to manually enter the phone number and details from the card yourself into your iPhone. They don't even attempt to be confident enough in automating this feature for you. Just check it out here... How they can seem so good at searching images but bad at direct OCR is a story for another post.

P.P.S. It could be argued that on Test 2, BizcardArmy had a lower case "s" for Suite in the street address field. One: case was not considered for any of the competitors on any of the fields so this doesn't impact the findings. And Two: In a fictitious world, if you mailed a letter to this fictitious address, it would still work.

*** In full disclosure, I pulled these test card images off public online images, so no worries about disclosing any private information.

BPO is a whale of an industry. But watch out ... cloud workers are uniting at CloudFactory...

Our annual team-building trip got postponed last week when we found out the highway was being blocked by a group striking about a traffic accident. We were heading up to Jiri, the gateway to Mount Everest, for 4 days of trekking and team-building and everyone was disappointed of course that we couldn't go. Apparently a truck and a bus got in a small accident but tempers flared about whose fault it was and a mob supporting the truck driver decided to beat up the bus driver.

A political organization then gathered people to declare a strike to close the highway and block all traffic until the government gave compensation for the bus driver's injuries and promised protection for these sort of incidents. Then the government didn't respond to their demands or show up for meetings and things got worse and well with people burning tires, wielding bricks and long bamboo sticks we decided it might not be the safest idea to go there.

(Note: These photos are from previous strikes in Nepal.)

It seems there are two extreme ways to deal with things in Nepal:

1. Slow and bureaucratic. The government, aid/charity and other organizations love meetings, committees and paperwork more than anything I have ever seen. Next week will mark 3 and half years that the country is without a constitution with many deadlines already passed and nothing to show at this point.
2. Strikes! At colleges, in neighborhoods, certain districts or the whole nation-wide it seems strikes are an accepted way to deal with things. Life comes to a stand still, travel is interrupted, businesses and workers lose money, people get injured, etc.

So on last Friday we decided to try something different for our monthly team-building/community service event. At 1pm I presented the challenge after playing U2's "Where the streets have no name" through the office speakers. Our community like the rest of Kathmandu and Nepal doesn't have street names or addresses. Mail is not delivered door to door, you can't order pizza and give your address and FedEx/UPS simply call to get verbal directions to your home or office. I remember when I first came to Nepal and went to get a SIM card for my mobile. The form had a big square box with the label, "Address:” I asked what to put there and they told me to draw a map to my house. Seriously.

So Friday was the day the CloudFactory team was going to unite to crowdsource the task of giving Bhaisepati Awash (our community) addresses. They had 4 hours to create a signboard to post in the community with a map and street names and they had to get out into the community to get people on every street to agree to a name for their own street. They collected ideas and suggestions and got a minimum of 25% of people on each of the 27 streets to agree on one name.

Back at the command center (CloudFactory office), people were using Google Maps to create a graphic and project it onto a big wooden signboard where they traced and then hand painted the streets and finalized street names. 

It isn't fancy but for 4 hours of work it raised awareness in the community about the value of street addresses and got people talking. In fact, some local groups were not too happy with our little team building project because they said they have already been working on this. In fact, there has been a local community group for years and years with the intention of doing this but they couldn't agree on how to name the streets or where to start. They objected to us posting the signboard and wanted to hold meetings first to approve even the temporary posting of our signboard.

We remembered the multiple meetings over one month that we had to attend just to get permission to hold the community wide cleanup and decided we would find a quicker compromise. We put a big "unofficial" label on the map and posted it in a less official place across from our office and told them we would only have it up for one week with the purpose of raising awareness.

So the takeaways for us as a team?

1. The community crowdsourcing project was sprung on the team and they had to elect leaders, break down the work and organize themselves towards a very tight 4-hour deadline. There was technical, artistic, communication and organizational skills that were all put to the test. It was awesome to see everyone come together to pull off a project like this in one afternoon.
2. There are positive and less bureaucratic ways to help encourage our country to move forward in development. It is going to take the bright young leaders in this country to come together with positive actions, awareness and determination.

We also learned some things about how we can work better together as a team in 2012. CloudFactory is growing and there are many challenges ahead but we look forward to tackling them as a united team that is dedicated to using our skills, experiences and talents to bring change to the community, country and world we live in.

Image Courtesy: Anamitra, Nagarik, Robin Fall on Flickr.com

For a bunch of Rails developers on the outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal - we have a pretty ambitious goal of creating work for 1 million people. It is often easy to get lost somewhere between writing lines of code and the superman vision of fighting poverty. I heard this quote a couple of years ago,

"If you want to change the world, start in your own backyard"

When we look out the windows of our large sunny office filled with iMacs, pleather couches and marble floors ... we are reminded that this is not the Bay Area. We live in poverty. Our 48 employees fight to park their motorcycles in our small parking area because the public parking lot across the street has become a garbage dump.

The garbage collectors go around from house to house on their bicycle carts (my home is only a block away so we are included) and then end up dumping it all across from our office to sort through it. Yes, they sort through every piece of dirty garbage hand by hand, often with their small kids helping. When we first moved to Nepal my wife was adamant about recycling everything because we did not want to add to the country's growing trash problem. Then we came to realize that the garbage collectors really were in the recycling business and they hand sort everything to gather whatever they can sell for recycling and get a few rupees.

Our management team has been working with the local community association to see if we can help find another place for the garbage sorting so we can actually build a nice little public area there, which was the original intent and plan for the area. But beyond this we realized it was time to get out and serve the community again. We have cleaned and painted a local park, planted some trees and did community cleanups in the past but this time was different. Our new community service coordinator planned things out better than I ever have and was able to get 6 or 7 other community businesses and organizations to join us in the effort. We had people from the local bank, community association, supermarket, a brick factory, the local rotary club, a women's coop and from a youth center in our area.

We divided everyone into five teams all named after the major lakes in Nepal (Begnas, Phewa, Rara and Tilicho) and handed out shovels, brooms, hoes, and other tools to help with the 3 foot weeds, bushes and garbage all over our neighborhood. We had prizes for the top teams and individuals, and a local lady famous for her amazing momos (steamed chicken dumplings) came to help our 2 kitchen staff make over 700 momos for everyone afterwards. There were over 50 really tired, hungry and dirty people at the end but also a deep sense of satisfaction.

Looking out the window today we only made a small dent. But we did make a difference. There were many from the community walking by and asking what we were doing and why we were doing it. I trust that next time we will have even more people join in. As one of the biggest companies in our area we are honored to take the lead in making small steps towards change. You have to start somewhere, you have to start small and focusing on ourselves and our own backyard feels like a step forward in our bigger dreams and plans as CloudFactory.

Living overseas in a developing country has brought a lot of new challenges and changes for our family. One of them is how we cook and prepare our meals, there just isn't a lot of frozen, canned and other processed foods available. My wife has learned how to work magic with flour, sugar, butter, salt, etc for baking everything from scratch and turning garlic, onions, spices and other vegetables into a fantastic meal. We even have a fresh pasta roller now - it all seems pretty rustic and labor intensive but in some way it has been yet another really refreshing advantage of escaping the rat race. 

I often get a phone call in the office asking to pick up ingredients on the way home and I am learning that there is a direct correlation between how fresh and high quality the items I buy are and how fantastic the meal turns out. Vegetables are not imported so whatever is in season, whatever is grown locally is available, that is it. The flour is not produced in huge quantities but from store to store and even bag to bag there can be a difference in quality. So selecting good ingredients has become a bit of an art, you can't just grab a can with a nice label and know it will be consistent.

Where I am going with all of this is that we are seeing very similar things in our world of crowdsourcing and CloudFactory. There seems to be a lot of companies that are focusing on creating platforms that do everything to weed out the bad work and bad workers. In fact one of our competitors said at a recent conference, "We are building a platform that doesn't matter how bad the workers are. We can get good quality from any worker, no matter how bay they are". Now we all know what they are getting at, but beyond majority vote, gold standard, reputation systems, machine learning tricks, probability, dynamic decision making, etc, etc .... there is still the matter of having good workers. Even master chefs with tried and true recipes are not going to be able to serve fantastic meals with rotten ingredients - it just doesn't work that way.

Crowdsourcing quality often comes down to a few things:

1. Find smart & motivated workers (great ingredients!)
2. Provide clear instructions & task forms
3. Match tasks to the qualified workers that enjoy those tasks
4. Use gold standard, majority vote and other fancy techniques for quality checking
5. Give easy tools for the chefs to design and create workflows
6. Make it simple to integrate into their business and applications (API)

These are things we spend our days (and often nights) at CloudFactory on. Working with our early clients and continuing to develop more than a platform but a full solution for crowdsourcing that is bigger than the sum of its parts (Solutions team, API, CLI, GUI, Backend, Worker Interface, Workforce, etc, etc).

One of the most exciting developments is our new Field Operations team that is preparing to start our next round of formal trials with our model for recruiting, training, testing, equipping, managing and multiplying cloud workers in developing nations. We don't believe the best way to find workers is just putting up an open webform for anyone to sign up online. We don't believe working alone in the dark with no accountability leads to good results. We are taking a different, hands-on approach to building up our workforce that when matched with the most innovative cloud labor platform will bring even better results for our clients.

This is why I believe social enterprises can be so successful. It isn't the poverty here in the Majority World that should be focused on, but instead the potential and opportunity of human potential yet to be unlocked. As we strive to bring transformation to the lives and communities of 1 million people in developing countries, we believe that a workforce of talented and motivated individuals will rise up to help crowdsourcing finally reach its full potential. These individuals are the raw ingredients that need to be carefully chosen and arranged as part of a great recipe to ensure success. And like every really good meal there needs to be that added extra ingredient of love. Sure, it is cheesy. But the best meals truly are the ones my wife makes with love that I can literally see and taste in the details. Similarly, great companies are more than best practices, policies and procedures, they are made up of talented people and a culture that can't always be explained with math and algorithms.