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Chirpsy Beta Unveiling At MIT Forum DEMO Event!

In Demember Chirpsy was selected to be one of 6 startups to present at the MIT Forum DEMO Event!  This was the first public unveiling of the Chirpsy service (still in Beta).  The presentation was mostly a live demonstration of the service and a little showcase of the back-end search and crowdsourcing technology.  

For those of you who don't know anything about Chirpsy, it's a service that helps businesses keep their Twitter accounts (and other microblogs) updated as often as they choose by providing human-crafted content that links to the latest blogs and breaking news.  We keep you in in control of everything that is posted while saving you a ton of time by performing research and writing drafts of tweets that you can easily edit and schedule for future posting.

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Photo Credit: Nat Seymour of Be Technical Graphics

Aside from the usual butterflies in my stomache, the Chirpsy demonstration went off without any major glitches, and I got a ton of fantastic questions after the demo was over.  As expected, the crowdsourcing aspects were of particular interest to the audience.  I also gave away 5 Free Chirpsy Beta Accounts at the event, which were snapped up quickly in follow up emails. :-)  

Although Chirpsy didn't win the DEMO Event, we had a fantastic time meeting investors, fellow entreprenuers, and others who were interested in learning more about our new service for social media marketers.  It was also exciting for me to gague audience reactions to this new service, nearly all of whome were hearing about it for the first time.

I want to give special thanks to Erik Chelstad of the Flying Apron Bakery (A fantastic Vegan and Gluetn Free Bakery in Freemont, WA) for being brave enough to volunteer his Flying Apron Twitter account for the live demonstration.

Chirpsy is Launching soon - stay tuned for an official Annoucement!  You'll naturally hear about it first from the @Chirpsy Twitter account.

Happy 6th Birthday, Amazon Mechanical Turk!

I helped launch Amazon Mechanical Turk on November 2nd, 2005.  The service happens to still be in beta, although the little ‘beta’ marker on the logo looks a lot smaller than it did in 2005.  :-)


I’ve been sitting on a collection of research papers, presentations, and data sets related to mTurk that I started collecting right after the service launched.  To celebrate Mechanical Turk’s Birthday, I thought it would be fun to blow the dust off a few of these documents by sharing them with all of you.  If you’ve seen these all before, I hope they at least spark a few fond memories.  
  • 2006 Aaron Koblin's TheSheepMarket Thesis.  I’ll still never forget seeing the tasks on mTurk and wondering, what the heck is this guy doing asking people to simply “draw a sheep facing left”?!?  Brilliant, that’s what. Aaron deserves a lot more than just this one post... so do yourself a favor and check out his other fantastic art-meets-data masterpieces you can find here: http://www.aaronkoblin.com/
  • 2011 Research Paper by Panos Ipeirotis about Analyzing the Amazon Mechanical Turk Marketplace.  Panos really deserves a lot of kudos for his years of thought provoking and critical work that focuses frequently on Crowdsourcing and specifically Mechanical Turk.  If you haven’t already, I highly recommend that you subscribe to his blog: A Computer Scienctiest In A Business School
So, those are a few highlights from my pilo-o-documents...  
Oh, and here's One More Thing: an image snapped of a few of the mTurk team members together a few months before launch (edit: I originally thought this was snapped on Oct 5th, 2005, but I've been corrected).  Amazon is a very casual work environment, but we decided to dress up one "Fashion Friday".  :-)
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Standing, from left to right: Chris Smoak, Peter Cohen, Supriya Uchil, Yu-Hui Jin, Anand Cheilan, Brian Sanderson, Alan  ?, Brian Hartley
Sitting, from left to right: Alex Castro, Ranganath Atreya, Jonathan Thompson (JT), John Bravenec, Isaac Nichols
Missing faces of folks on the team in 2005: Mike Diggins, Eli Aleyner, Mikhail Seregine, Reza Hussein, Vidya Iyer, Brian Cameros, Doug Treder, Brian Sanders, Jenny Chen, Kris Van Hees, David Parrott, Adam Bradley... and I’m probably missing a few more folks... anyone want to help me fill in the blanks?  :-)

Today also happens to be the 2nd Annual CrowdConf, hosted by CrowdFlower!  

I’ll be at CrowdConf all day today.  Although I don’t work with Amazon anymore (and haven’t for a number of years), I’m still very much actively involved in the crowdsourcing industry.

If you’re at CrowdConf and want to chat, please send me a note via email or Twitter!  I’d be happy to chat with you about some old Mechanical Turk lore or about my more recent forays with crowdsourcing.

And if you have your own Mechanical Turk stories, I’d love to hear about them - so please share by leaving a comment below!

Happy Birthday mTurk!  - Isaac

 

Breathing New Life Into My Blog (Life Update Edition)

About a year ago I posted the first entry to this blog.  As you can see, nothing followed.  I had fully intended to post on a regular basis about personal and business related topics.  
 
So, what happened?  Life happened - well, not literally (no, I didn’t have a baby... yet), but a whole lot of events did transpire which caused me to put this blog on the proverbial back-burner.  Shortly after my first posting last year I attended the first ever crowdsourcing convention, called CrowdConf.  Through a somewhat roundabout way, that event sparked conversations that eventually led to the acquisition of my business, TurkForce by CrowdFlower, the organizers of CrowdConf.  

In parallel to this change in business was the planning stages for another life event: I was getting married in June to my lovely wife Lauren.  For anyone who has planned a large wedding, it’s a lot of work, but totally woth it!
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At the end of June I parted ways with CrowdFlower, went on a fabulous honeymoon to Fiji, and came home refreshed and ready dive into a business idea I had sidelined a few years ago, a service called Chirpsy (more on that in the future).  

This last year has been quite a wild ride, but now that elements of my life have settled down, I’m finally going to get back to this blog!  Over the last few months I’ve been working out a series of posts that I hope you will find fun to read and thought provoking.

For those who know me, it will come as not surprise that I’ve got a lot to say about crowdsourcing (of the Mechanical Turk variety), building businesses on top of a crowdsourced workforce, and many opinions about the technology landscape (I probably spend way too much of my spare time consuming technology news and blogs).

I’ll be at CrowdConf again this year (scheduled for November 2nd). I’m planning to blog my observations and reactions to what I see and hear at the event.  

If you are interested in meeting up at CrowdConf, please get in touch with me via Twitter @isaacn.  Cheers!

Just another voice, adding to the global village

Hello, and thanks in advance for listening.  I've been a listener myself for a very long time and now I feel the time is right to flip the proverbial writing bit to the ON position. I plan to write about the topics I follow out of habit, the majority being the latest business and technology news and trends. Additionally I expect this space to include a smattering of my personal hobbies and interests, such as my love of the great outdoors and passion for traveling the world and experiencing the people, places, and culture I encounter first hand.  I look forward to any reactions or discussions that transpire as well as continually evolving and refining my writing abilities. 
 
Cheers!
Isaac Nichols