We’re incredibly excited to announce a $7.3 million Series B round from prominent impact investors including Dolma Impact Fund and The Social Entrepreneurs' Fund. The investment comes after the successful launch of WorkStreams™, which provide fast-growing companies an alternative to the stagnant outsourcing and dubious crowdsourcing options currently available.

This is a guest post by Lauren Maffeo. Lauren loves travel, running, and the written word. She oversees content strategy at Aha! -- the world's #1 product roadmap software. Previously, she has earned bylines as a contributing writer to The Next Web, The Guardian, Mic, and more. Her work has been cited by The Atlantic, Huffington Post, and the textbook, "Digital Innovations for Mass Communications: Engaging the User".

Last month, I spoke on a panel hosted by Tech in Motion in Washington, D.C. The panel discussed a year-in-review of 2014 tech news and made predictions for 2015. We reviewed themes including regulation, cybersecurity, and emerging technology. It was apparent that technology's pace is hard to keep up with -- and that software permeates it all.

Videos can have an amazing effect on your website’s SEO. However, to reap the full benefits of digital video, it's not enough to simply post a video to your page and walk away. Instead, you should provide a video transcription to bolster your SEO opportunities. In the following post we lay out five SEO benefits of video transcription you may be missing out on.

Transcription Makes Your Video Content Indexable
Even though videos are considered content, search engine crawlers are unable to understand and index the visual and audio content of a video. Transcripts are textual representations of the spoken content in a video and solves this problem. If you consider a news article, there is typically a title, byline, and body of the text. Each of these elements can be crawled and indexed by search engines.

DURHAM, N.C., October 10, 2014 – CloudFactory, a distributed labor platform melding human and machine intelligence, today announced it has raised $3 million in a Series A offering led by VRBO founder David Clouse, with participation from other institutional and angel investors.

CloudFactory’s unique combination of technology and a dedicated cloud workforce lets fellow technology-based companies grow their businesses by creating new revenue streams, improving customer retention, and widening adoption, by adding capabilities that can’t be accomplished with technology alone. CloudFactory’s technology platform breaks work down into a series of smaller tasks along a virtual production line, intelligently distributes the tasks to the optimal workers, and reassembles the completed tasks, all while continuously assuring quality both manually and algorithmically.

“Luddite.”  

In the tech realm, them’s fighting words.

Honestly though, I think we can all feel a little sympathy for the Luddites, both modern and historical. There is no doubt that the future can be intimidating; it’s little surprise that more and more people are siding with their conservative cause. Jobs are at risk. The middle class is shrinking. And, didn’t we all gasp in horror when Ken Jennings bowed down to his new computer overlord Watson on Jeopardy?

Healthcare is an intensely document-driven industry, and without a proper way to handle the growing inflow, health information management (HIM) professionals are feeling the heat. The regulatory environment, changing buyer expectations, and evolving technology are collectively forcing these professionals to push the limits of their capabilities. And in this industry, time is of the essence—in order to stay afloat, clinical documents must be analyzed and stored as electronic medical/health records (EMR/EHR) immediately upon arriving to the lab.

At CloudFactory, we face the everyday challenge of training a diverse group of workers from different cultural backgrounds and with different learning experiences. Our job is to equip them with the skills necessary to perform our data entry tasks.

However, the list of data tasks that our workers must perform--that is, that our clients need--is constantly growing. As a result, we are continually teaching our workers new tasks, many of which require them to master specific skills.

We have spent much of the last four years building our factory in the cloud and ran into many challenges along the way. As a victim of our own success, one of those challenges last year was when the volume of work required us to scale and optimize our technology platform faster than we ever anticipated.

This post is written by Genevieve Patterson. She is a PhD student in 'Computer Vision' at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. This post originally appeared on Genevieve’s CS blog and has been republished with permission.

The core of computer vision is concentrated on learning how to automatically recognise things that humans are already awesome at recognising (dogs, cats, sail boats, handwriting, etc.). Humans can recognise these things in approximately 0.3 seconds -- you can recognize a Jack Russell before you can even think the words ‘super cute dog'. Humans are great computers.

Google recently piloted in New Zealand an experimental technology that, when scaled, could provide the opportunity for Internet access for anyone in the world. By connecting a network of solar-powered balloons floating in the literal stratosphere to homes on the ground, individuals in hard-to-connect places can access the Internet. From a marketing and PR standpoint, it’s a win for a company like Google to set themselves up as helping people around the world by connecting them to the Internet.