We are CrowdFlower, a San Francisco crowdsourcing company. We take big complex data projects, break them down into small simple repetitive projects, which we call “microtasks,” and send them to an online workforce, otherwise known as the “crowd.” Our crowd represents the world’s largest workforce and is comprised of millions of online contributors around the world. We’ve spent years refining our quality control strategies and crowd management techniques in order to provide accurate results at very high scale. Lifetime, we’ve worked with more than 3 million contributors, collected nearly half a billion human judgments, and completed about 4 years of man-work on any given day.
So you might be wondering, “How can the crowd help me?”
Our most recent product launch, RTFM (Real Time Foto Moderator), makes it infinitely easier for site owners and app developers to moderate user-generated photos. We know that moderating user-generated content is a major concern for every site out there. Devising a successful and scalable strategy for keeping offensive content out of production can be difficult. After 50+ conversations with app developers, community managers and site owners, we’ve learned that the options for apps are essentially:
- Ignore the issue of moderation and cross your fingers that users/Apple doesn’t come after you
- Devote costly engineering resources to creating an in-house moderation system from scratch
- Use a third party solution that is expensive, slow, and often returns inaccurate results.
RTFM, our new image moderation tool, solves these major problems. It screens images for nudity, porn, spam, violence and other offensive content. And it is easy to use. You send us the URL of an image via our API. Images go out to the crowd for review. A minimum of five trusted and trained humans review every single image. And the average turnaround time for each image is less than 15 minutes. The API access is easy and the documentation is simple. Users pay as they go—no sales contract required.
Go to http://crowdflower.com/rtfm to learn more and to sign up for an account. The first 500 images you process are free under any plan. As a valued partner in the Online Dating Insider community, you can receive a special additional discount of $100 (that’s worth 5,000 images). To redeem this coupon code, go to the RTFM homepage at http://crowdflower.com/rtfm and enter “DATING12” in the coupon code box. Valid through July 1, 2012. For questions or feedback, please email rtfm [at] crowdflower [dot] com.
