Might be a bit off topic, but does anyone know a good alternative to MTurk for people outside the US?
I successfully used http://www.crowdflower.com to submit jobs to MT from outside the US.
How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea
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Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea
#12I've seen weirder use for mechanical turk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_CC5r5Wfm0 So, I guess why not?
Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea
#13Might be a bit off topic, but does anyone know a good alternative to MTurk for people outside the US?
Hi zumda, I have used http://crowdflower.com before. You get an account manager to help you which is neccessary as there is no supporting documentation and the interface is a little confusing / unhelpful when things don't work out.
Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea
#14May be the survey data us worth useful if your startup's target audience consists of folks who earn pennies on the hour.
Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea
#15Might be a bit off topic, but does anyone know a good alternative to MTurk for people outside the US?
I'm building an API on top of MTurk, http://houdinihq.com, that you could use. It's currently in alpha, but feel free to email me at presto@houdinihq.com if you're interested in an api key.
Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea
#16Might be a bit off topic, but does anyone know a good alternative to MTurk for people outside the US?
I'm building an API on top of MTurk, http://houdinihq.com , that you could use. It's currently in alpha, but feel free to email me at presto@houdinihq.com if you're interested in an api key.
Simple API looks really simple, something that I definitely like!
How do you plan to accept payments? How much would Houdini itself cost (per task, per month?)? Do you plan to accept non-US users?
Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea
#17The post would be more interesting if we knew what questions were asked in the survey. Edit: I meant how exactly were the survey looked like, including the service description. If it's a paid service, I highly doubt the 73% figure.
Me, too. I checked my stats after using MT for a site-survey. Most of the users were from the same geographical region, they gave very positive feedback, and they spent very little time on the site. Pair that with an understanding that MT only pays well if you do lots of little tasks very fast, and you start to get the idea that the feedback might not be the most useful.
Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea
#18The post would be more interesting if we knew what questions were asked in the survey. Edit: I meant how exactly were the survey looked like, including the service description. If it's a paid service, I highly doubt the 73% figure.
Me, too. I checked my stats after using MT for a site-survey. Most of the users were from the same geographical region, they gave very positive feedback, and they spent very little time on the site. Pair that with an understanding that MT only pays well if you do lots of little tasks very fast, and you start to get the idea that the feedback might not be the most useful.
You need to put in a text box: "Please describe, in your own words, the purpose of my site:" Then throw out all the responses that are incomplete or way off. The problem is that when I did that, there were too few useable results.
Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm building an API on top of MTurk, http://houdinihq.com , that you could use. It's currently in alpha, but feel free to email me at presto@houdinihq.com if you're interested in an api key.
Simple API looks really simple, something that I definitely like! How do you plan to accept payments? How much would Houdini itself cost (per task, per month?)? Do you plan to accept non-US users?
Thanks! We also have some more advanced apis in the works, like asking multiple workers to do the same work and automatically determining the 'true' answer. From your point of view, they'll be just as easy to use though.
Pricing is still TBD. MTurk charges will be passed through directly to you with Houdini-specific charges either per task or per month.
Yeah, I'm planning on accepting non-US users.
Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea
#20Might be a bit off topic, but does anyone know a good alternative to MTurk for people outside the US?
I believe that Feedback army is explicitly designed for this sort of thing. It is layered on top of MT, But takes paypal or credit cards directly, and is dead-simple to use.