The core concept of Samasource is essentially that technology helps us unlock human talent
wherever it may happen to reside.
That we should no longer be victims of the birth lottery.
That no one should be stuck in a poor place where they don’t have a job simply because
of an accident of birth.
And what technology enables us to do now is to tap into this brain power through the Internet
through a concept that we built called microwork.
So Samasource’s mission is to give work to people who need it most using the Internet
and we do that by sourcing large technology contracts from big enterprises like Google,
Linked In, Ebay, Walmart.com and Microsoft which are all our customers.
And we gather this work and then we unitize it into small tasks.
And the small tasks we call microwork.
And then those small tasks we train people on the other side of the world to do them
from local computer centers.
So the tasks might be as simple as tagging an image.
For example, we work with the largest image archive in the world that supplies images
of celebrities for major tabloid magazines and media agencies.
We work with companies that catalog images as part of major databases.
We work with companies that use images for essential processes.
For example, one of the companies we work with uses our image tagging to teach cars
to stop before they hit a pedestrian, to automate the process of recognizing when a car is going
to be close to a pedestrian.
It’s a new application of what’s called machine learning.
So a basic task like tagging an image and telling us whether there’s a person in this
image or whether this is Rihanna or Andy Samberg, all of these types of tasks can be used for
major applications.
At the higher end of the spectrum we do things like content production.
So we actually train people in low income countries who speak English fluently to write
content, write custom content for websites and that’s part of a growing need for people
to have unique content on their website to draw customers to it.
And this kind of work didn’t exist ten years ago, right.
I mean we didn’t have these complicated machine learning algorithms that were teaching
cars to, you know, to drive by themselves.
And now that we do there’s a huge need for people to help with these small tasks with
microwork.
So the way it works in practice is I have a team based in San Francisco that sources
work from major companies and we source these contracts.
We compete based on quality and cost and turnaround time just like any other data services provider.
And then on the back end we have workers all over the world.
We have about 900 workers globally now in East Africa, South Asia and Haiti who do these
pieces of microwork from these local computer centers.
And we partner with local entrepreneurs who run computer centers that maintain the infrastructure
for us.
For the customer, for Google or Microsoft, it’s just like working with any other data
services company.
They can log into our platform and see the work being done in real time.
But on the back end it looks totally different.
It looks like a man waking up in a rural village in Northern Uganda and walking to a computer
center where there’s high speed internet and air conditioning and a computer screen
and where he’s able to do these tasks through our technology platform.