Now, in a matter of minutes and with no software development
resources required, businesses can outsource thousands of tasks,
manage a virtual workforce and easily download work results
SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 30, 2008--Amazon Web Services LLC
("AWS"), a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), today launched
a new set of web-based tools for Amazon Mechanical Turk that make it
easy for businesses to use Mechanical Turk to outsource work to an
on-demand, scalable workforce via a simple graphical interface--in
just a few minutes and without writing any code. The new web-based
interface guides business users through the process of designing Human
Intelligence Tasks (HITs), publishing up to hundreds of thousands of
HITs simultaneously, monitoring worker activity, and retrieving work
results. Previously, businesses without software development expertise
or who didn't have software development resources to spare either
needed to individually enter and retrieve each HIT (which was
time-consuming) or could not leverage Mechanical Turk for the
thousands of tasks they needed done. These new web-based tools are now
available in addition to the existing set of APIs software developers
have been using to integrate Mechanical Turk into their applications.
Businesses can take advantage of these new tools by visiting
http://www.mturk.com.
"Until today many businesses were unable to take advantage of
Mechanical Turk's on-demand, scalable workforce because they did not
have programming skills or their developer resources were committed
elsewhere. With these new web-based tools, any business, in just a few
minutes, can submit work that requires human intelligence to a
workforce of hundreds of thousands workers from over one hundred
countries," said Sharon Chiarella, Vice President of Amazon Mechanical
Turk. "This is an opportunity for businesses to get important work
done quickly, inexpensively, and with quality."
In addition to a web-based editor for designing HITs, Amazon
Mechanical Turk offers several sample templates to help Requesters get
started (Requester is the Mechanical Turk term for users that want to
get work done). Sample HIT templates represent best practices from the
past two years and cover the most common use cases of Mechanical Turk,
such as Image Tagging, Search Relevance, Data Collection, Data
Extraction, Surveys, Site Filtering, Image Filtering, Product
Comparison, Product Categorization and Data Correction. Each sample
HIT template defines the HIT's look and feel, and allows specification
of payment terms and Worker requirements (Worker is the Mechanical
Turk term for humans that complete HITs). These sample HIT templates
can be used as is or modified to address a different use case.
Once a Requester has designed their HIT template, Requesters can
enter each task individually, but most will take advantage of the new
bulk-uploading capabilities. The new tools allow Requesters to use
spreadsheets they may already be using to manage the new data they are
putting in and retrieving from Mechanical Turk (in fact, CSV files can
be loaded directly into Mechanical Turk). Once their HITs are
published on Mechanical Turk, Requesters can watch the progress of
their work being done, download results, and approve or disapprove
their completed HITs. This simple and non-technical process allows
business analysts and other non-technical professionals to leverage
the on-demand, global workforce in Mechanical Turk without any need
for software development resources.
"We use Amazon Mechanical Turk for picture moderation and
auto-tagging on SnapMyLife, our mobile photo sharing property," says
George Grey from Mobicious, Inc., a company that creates content,
services, and applications for mobile phone users. "With Mechanical
Turk's help, we have tripled our business over the previous quarter
and found clear cost benefits over in-house or other out-sourcing
options. We benefit from high quality work and fast results, with
scalable coverage 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, which we couldn't do
as effectively without Mechanical Turk. The new tools for loading our
HITs in bulk will allow us to add even more work to Mechanical Turk
while also saving time."
"Image tagging is dramatically enhanced by the human element that
Amazon Mechanical Turk provides," said Michael Droz, CEO of
Tagcow.com, a provider of image tagging services for consumers and
businesses. "Algorithms can identify landscapes or even human faces,
but we are decades away from computers being able to recognize a 'cute
baby' or 'nineteenth century impressionism.' Mechanical Turk's
scalable, on-demand workforce provides a rich cultural and emotional
depth to our image tags, making the images more easily discoverable
through traditional search. This has been instrumental in delivering
our high customer satisfaction. The new tools introduced for
Mechanical Turk will help us respond more quickly and efficiently when
the images coming into our service spikes--virtually anyone in our
company can now load thousands of images that need tagging into
Mechanical Turk and retrieve the results."
About Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires
human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses
access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce. Developers can
access the Mechanical Turk web service to programmatically access this
marketplace and leverage this service to build human intelligence
directly into their applications.
About Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in
Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers
Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most
customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover
anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its
customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers
offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories
such as books, movies, music & games, digital downloads, electronics &
computers, home & garden, toys, kids & baby, grocery, apparel, shoes &
jewelry, health & beauty, sports & outdoors, and tools, auto &
industrial.
Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with
access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own
back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable
virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by
Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2),
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon
Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service
(Amazon FPS), and Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including
www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp,
www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and the Joyo Amazon websites at
www.joyo.cn and www.amazon.cn.
As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms
include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context
indicates otherwise.
Forward-Looking Statements
This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the
meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E
of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ
significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking
statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others,
risks related to competition, management of growth, new products,
services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating
results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and
claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial
agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange
rates, system interruption, significant amount of indebtedness,
inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud.
More information about factors that potentially could affect
Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings
with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual
Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2007, and
subsequent filings.
CONTACT:
Amazon.com
Media Hotline,
206-266-7180
SOURCE: Amazon.com Inc.
