Question: Software developer Lukas Biewald had a problem at the office. He needed an army of temporary workers to tackle a simple but huge task that couldn't be automated. However, he had neither the time nor the budget to work with a conventional temp agency to engage the workers
Instead, Biewald turned to Mechanical Turk, the online labor force operated by Amazon, for his temp workers. At Mechanical Turk, for about $2 an hour, employers can hire large numbers of freelancers (called "turkers") for a variety of menial tasks. There was just one drawback, though: Biewald needed the work to be accurate, and he didn't have time to monitor the quality of the output he would receive. Biewald's unmet need-for someone to assure an accurate, efficient labor force for his assignment-sparked the idea that eventually led him, in 2007, to found Dolores Labs: a business that, you could say, was born out of necessity. San Francisco-based Dolores Labs serves as a middleman between the emerging cadre of "cloud labor"-the thousands of online moonlighters available to do simple tasks at bargain-basement hourly rates-and the organizations that want to hire them. The company fills the need by ensuring accountability and quality output from the cloud labor. How is Dolores Labs able to deliver on its claim? Through its product, Crowd Flower, which consists of a set of statistical quality control algorithms devised to evaluate the accuracy and speed of cloud workers for a given task. The company emphasizes scalability: using Crowd Flower, clients can design a job to custom specifications. Crowd Flower provides the labor to deliver the work accurately and efficiently. Crowd Flower screens candidates by giving them a dummy assignment and comparing their performance to that of veteran workers whose performance level is a known quantity. With increasing demand for inexpensive yet reliable labor to perform low-budget tasks where accuracy is important-such as medical transcription, content monitoring, marketing research, piracy policing, and others-the future looks bright for Dolores Labs. Already, the company has signed nearly two dozen clients since its founding. It received $5 million in venture capital in 2010. Meanwhile, Crowd Flower's capabilities are being applied in other interesting ways. Leadership at Dolores Labs provided Crowd Flower's help following the earthquake in Haiti, where it was used to deploy volunteers to appropriate tasks throughout the devastated nation.
1. How does each of the five components of the marketing environment come into play for Dolores Labs?
2. Dolores Labs' involvement in helping to create a system for delivering humanitarian aid to the people of Haiti after the 2010 earthquake illustrates how a high-tech business can benefit society in a "high-touch" way. What other kinds of projects could a company like Dolores Labs undertake that would create similar impact?