Gigwalk likes to put your smartphone to work. On Wednesday the startup is commencing its stage for on-demand, on-location task completion.
Businesses can use Gigwalk to mail straightforward tasks that can be accomplished by any individual who has a smartphone. A task might, for example, inquire users to take photographs of a restaurant’s list and response a sequence of inquiries (i.e. “Is the establishment wheelchair friendly?”).
Using an iPhone app [iTunes link], Gigwalk constituents — or “Gigwalkers” — signal up to entire jobs beside them in exchange for between $3 and $90 per task.
It’s not precisely a fulltime job, but it is an so straightforward way to tally some very fast additional cash. The largest paid Gigwalker in the six-month long personal beta acquired $2,173 for 277 accomplished “gigs.”
“Every lone iPhone or Android is a node in a network,” states co-founder and CEO Ariel Seidman. “We’re seeking to cause that node and state that it really assist to a workforce.”
During the personal beta time span, GPS manufacturer TomTom dispatched Gigwalkers to exact road bends to verify chart components like road names. It wouldn’t have had the capital to ascertain the correctness of their charts by going by car every street themselves. Similarly, Motorola engaged the Gigwalk workforce to scope out the positioning of its telephones in Verizon shops after the carrier begun trading iPhones. Local directories, buyer study companies and genuine land parcel businesses have furthermore marked on.
Before Gigwalk, Seidman states, numerous of his business clients had turned to Craigslist to load up these mini-positions.
Standard (and normally much cheaper) crowdsourcing stages like Mechanical Turk often aren’t choices because there’s no way to verify that the individual accomplishing an on-location task really left his or her computer to entire it. A smartphone-based stage, on the other hand, has GPS.
There isn’t an comprehensive filtering method that works out who becomes Gigwalkers, but so far a “street cred” status tally that pays persons who manage consistently good work with more convoluted and higher-paying jobs has been sufficient. People who don’t rendezvous a task’s asserted measures don’t get paid for that task.
Seidman, the previous controller of merchandise administration at Yahoo Mobile Search, is wagering that persons are prepared to use their telephones to get access to “corporate-based networks” like Gigwalk in supplement to utilising them to get access to communal and amusement networks. He has increased $1.7 million in kernel funding from persons who acquiesce — including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and LiveOps co-founder Bill Trenchard.
