IPFS News Link • Communications
New Apps for the Bottom Billion
• http://www.technologyreview.com, By David TalbotThe researchers have shown how to use the technology to crowdsource the task of digitizing handwritten documents word by word, a type of work that anyone with an inexpensive phone could do for extra money. A handwritten word is displayed as the image—resembling retro graphics from 1980s Atari games—and the phone owner types in the word, contributing piecemeal to a larger job.
"Crowdsourcing on phones really has potential to provide substantial income for people who are very poor and have a lot of time on their hands," says Ed Cutrell, a computer scientist at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore. "That's one of the main things we're interested in here: are there means to provide supplemental income to people who don't have computer and Internet access?"