Crowd Sourcing - CrowdFlower.com
, a startup launched by Dolores Labs, just raised a fair amount of money (5mm) through Bessemer and Trinity Ventures. What I like about CrowdFlower is that they're taking an innovative approach to "Labor as a Service" (LaaS)....instead of trying to source their own group of workers & projects, they've aggregated labor from other LaaS sites (like Amazon Turk). What I like about this approach is that they've essentially cut out half of the marketing equation for themselves - they can now focus on ensuring that the data provided meets a certain quality, and targeting projects instead. I always though the effort was a bit large for other LaaS companies - trying to pool together both labor and project demand is expensive and difficult.
The second impressive component to CrowdFlower is their Quality Assurance and pricing mechanisms. I strongly believe of all the LaaS services out there, this one has a shot at differentiating itself because it targets one side of the equation, and does it well.
Check them out ! Crowdflower.com