August 2010 - clickworker.com

The headquarters of Clickworker may look small. That’s because the majority of its workforce doesn’t work out of the Pittsford office. “We have internet workers – more than 25,000 in the U.S.,” said David Moufarrege of Clickworker. “(They) take on small projects at a time and process them.” What makes this company unique isn’t the thousands of part-time workers it has hired in the last five months. It’s who’s funding the hiring push – German investors.

When many people think of crowdsourcing they often think of the look-and-click tasks that were some of the first documented examples of crowdsourcing in the 1990’s. For example, between November 2000 and September 2001, volunteer clickworkers helped NASA identify craters in photos from Mars. And in 2007 Michael Jackson’s white glove in the video of “Billie Jean” was marked by clickworkers 125,000 times in 72 hours during the White Glove Tracking project.