The Crowd of Elves in the back room

Pixazza, a Google-backed company, is set on tagging every product photo on the Net so it can be linked to ads and e-commerce. How do they do all that tagging? Crowdsourcing, silly. Even though you'd never know that just by looking at their website. In this case, Crowdsourcing is just smarter outsourcing and since it serves only their internal eco-system, it isn't worth mentioning. The company is much more interested talking about turning photos into 'buy now' buttons.

This is an important chapters in the crowdsourcing story, companies that are essentially building new services on top of crowdsourced labor. There are only a handful now but there will be many more.

There are only two potential problems: 1) The photo-tagging crowd can never really evolve beyond this narrow task so I imagine that crowd-churn is significant. 2) I can never remember the name of Pixazza, the spelling activates the dyslexia gene and Pizzapix keeps coming to mind.