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. 

 

On November 1st,  we organized the first ever crowdsourcing hackathon, "CrowdHack" at Crowdconf in San Franciso, CA. We'd like to thank our supporters and well wisheshers.  

Here is what people said about CloudFactory and CrowdHack during this event. 

It is 11pm and one hour ago the first ever crowdsourcing hackathon, CrowdHack, came to a close with around 10 teams demoing their entries. Some very cool stuff! Here are some highlights:

• crowdsourced barometer readings via app installed on mobile phones to collect barometric pressure data and predict the weather better than it has ever been possible
• submit a photo of your mole and the crowd will advise you if you may have melanoma based on 5 key indicators
• cloud workers in India being commissioned to leave their computer to clean up a street or park and submitting before and after photos
• twilio robot calling restaurants to collect enhanced business listing data like if they take reservations, have vegetarian dishes on the menu
• a python module to real-time ask a human any question from your code
• sorting algorithm with the comparator being humans deciding what they like
• have the crowd choose a color scheme based on a theme/idea

Now the crowds are continuing to work through the night and the final judging will take place at 10am tomorrow and awards given out on stage at the CrowdConf reception at 5pm. With about 35 developers showing up for the 12 hour event to collaborate, learn and hack some neat things we are happy to see CrowdConf get kicked off with people getting their hands dirty and doing some actual crowdsourcing.  Developers are finding great ways to solve problems every day and using crowdsourcing is a super powerful way to accomplish some big things that could never be possible otherwise.

We will soon post more info on the winners with some photos, perhaps video of their presentations and even links to some of the apps that are live on the web.

Big thanks goes out to Twilio, GitHub and CrowdFlower for joining us in sponsoring and making the first ever crowdsourcing hackathon happen.

If you are a developer and haven't tried out the Twilio API yet ... go do so right now. A year or so ago I discovered it late one Saturday evening and within 10 minutes I had Ruby code that was making my phone ring. The night was a write-off as a hacked my way into the wee hours of the morning to build a cool little Twilio app.

Twilio is one of the strongest supporters of the developer community we have ever seen. If we could have dreamed of two perfect sponsors for CrowdHack it would have been GitHub and Twilio. Tada! Twilio contacted us and offered to sponsor a Pizza and Salad Buffet for the whole event on Tuesday. Yep, they are cool like that. And they are also offering a bunch of free Twilio credit to the winner of our newest CrowdHack prize, "Best use of Twilio API".

So Twilio + crowdsourcing ... hmmmm ... this is going to get really fun. I don't want to steal anyone's ideas but here are some possibilities that come to mind:

• Use Twilio's Client API (copy/paste 3 lines!) to allow cloud workers to collaborate real-time on tasks by talking to each other right in their browsers.
• Use Twilio's SMS API to run instant "wisdom of crowds" experiments in a room full of people. Everyone submits their guess via SMS and the best/averaged/popular answer is instantly calculated.
• Use CloudFactory's experimental TwilioRobot being released at CrowdHack to incorporate Twilio voice calls into crowdsourcing workflows. Build an assembly line for enhanced business listings that calls to verify the phone number and asks questions like "How many vegetarian dishes do you have on your menu?" or "Do you have free WiFi at your hotel?". The recorded message after the beep is fed as input to the next task station where a cloud worker can transcribe or interpret the answers.

The possibilities are endless. 

We just opened up a few more spots today so jump over to register and we'll see you at 8:30am for registration this Tuesday!

There has been talk about whether crowdsourcing is an industry or not but definitions aside, we have been absolutely blown away the last couple of months as we have been welcomed into the crowdsourcing "family". I have spent seasons of my career in the Java world, wireless carrier/handset world, web application outsourcing world, and even the Christian marketplace dealing with book publishers and churches. And I think I came out with a unhealthy, cut-throat perspective on business and competition. Now that we have been living overseas for a few years in Nepal where we are focused on training people up and giving opportunities here, I thought we would be the friendly company on the block. Not so! As we have launched CloudFactory and started to spend more time in places like the Bay Area we have learned ... that we have a lot to learn!

The week before our launch at TechCrunch Disrupt in SF we met the CEO from Microtask - a competitor of sorts to CloudFactory. After launching into a couple of amazing discussions about the industry and each of our approaches/challenges we met up again a couple days later and then he invited us out to dinner with some friends, introduced us to some key contacts in the Bay Area, then blogged and tweeted about CloudFactory. Great guy, great business - we are now big fans of Microtask.

We came up with an idea to do a hackathon at CrowdConf and so we contacted CrowdFlower, again another competitor of sorts, because they are the conference organizer. They loved the idea and about 100 emails and a few conference calls later, CrowdHack is just 4 days away. They helped find GitHub as a co-sponsor and are themselves sponsoring the event alongside us. I can't wait to meet their team next week in San Francisco and thank them face to face. 

After launching CloudFactory we received a bunch of contact attempts from a Sr. Manager at Amazon Mechanical Turk - some might say yet another competitor of sorts. They couldn't believe what we had built, that we build it in Nepal and all of it without them knowing a thing about it. But we had been working with the mTurk API and tools for 2 years already. It is a testimony of mTurk's robustness, API and documentation that we were able to integrate CloudFactory with mTurk and begin sending them a majority of our work without ever even talking. They loved our virtual assembly line approach, built-in best practices for quality and of course our heart to see cloud workers raised up in developing nations. We are now an official Mechanical Turk Solution Provider and they are sending clients our way that are looking for advanced workflows and quality control but like the self-serve approach and ease of CloudFactory. Unlike many big companies they have been so easy to work with and again we can't wait to meet up with them next week at CrowdConf.

Being inspired by all this competitor love we decided to take a chance and pop in to the MobileWorks office while in San Francisco. We caught one of the co-founders and sat down in their boardroom to swap stories. It was awesome to see the common vision of fighting poverty through crowdsourcing and we were able to leave a handmade gift we brought from Nepal. They followed up with a generous idea on how to collaborate that we are continuing to explore.

I could go on. The bottom line is that we have been adopted into a welcoming and growing industry where there is so much opportunity that we can support each other and be friends even though there are overlaps in our solutions and offerings. Industries that stick together, grow together - and that is why we are so excited about attending CrowdConf next week where we can meet others in person and pass on the warm approach we have been learning.