AllThingsD » Mechanical Turk

PaperKarma's Mobile App Tries to Eliminate Junk From Your Mailbox

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:58:08 +0000

PaperKarma is a new app that helps you reduce the amount of unwanted coupons, catalogs and postcards that clog your mailbox.

Users download the app to their iOS, Android or Windows Phone device; register, and then start snapping photos of the unwanted mail.

Once a photo is taken, the user taps the “Unsubscribe Me” button, and then PaperKarma does the legwork.

Sean Mortazavi, the CEO and founder of PaperKarma, who also works full-time at Microsoft, has spent countless hours and weekends tracking down 10,000 of the biggest junk-mail offenders so that you don’t have to.

The only full-time employee PaperKarma has is Brendan Ribera, an engineer formerly from Urbanspoon and iLike. He is also co-founder. Currently, Mortazavi, who works on open-source projects in Microsoft’s Visual Studio division, is self-funding the project.

Mortazavi said more than 100 billion pieces of junk mail are sent every year in the U.S. alone, making it both time-consuming and a waste of natural resources.

The company already has a long list of companies in its database, but if users submit requests for something that isn’t on file, PaperKarma will use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to track down the culprit. The Turk typically can track down people for hire at a reasonable price.

PaperKarma’s mobile apps, which are free, launched 10 days ago.

Mortazavi imagines being able to make money in the future by partnering with various businesses.

For instance, you may not want the flyer from Costco, but you may be willing to opt in for electronic coupons. PaperKarma could then charge the business for finding that customer, because it also would be saving them printing costs and mailing fees.

A couple of services like this already exist, but Mortazavi said it’s the first one to create a mobile solution.

Doxo and Earth Class Mail, two other Seattle companies, are addressing the problem in different ways.

Doxo encourages users to sign up for electronic communications with companies, which in turn saves those companies money. Earth Class Mail will accept all of your mail at its warehouses; if the mail is not junk, Earth Class Mail will open it, scan it, and send you an electronic version.

Greylock's Reid Hoffman and David Sze on the Future of Social (Video)

Liz Gannes — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 19:39:49 +0000

Reid Hoffman’s cute line about the future is, “it’s always sooner and stranger than you think.”

Hoffman, a PayPal Mafia member and the incredibly connected co-founder of LinkedIn, has been an early investor in just about every important social Web (formerly Web 2.0) start-up: Facebook, Zynga, Flickr, Friendster. (As a rare exception, Hoffman didn’t get in on Twitter early, but has a small piece through its purchase of Mixer Labs.)

Hoffman recently joined Greylock Partners, where he was given a $20 million seed-stage investment fund to play with. (Announced in September, the Greylock Discovery Fund had closed nine investments as of the time we filmed this video a few weeks back. Update: The total is now 15 Discovery Fund investments.)

Hoffman’s partner in crime at Greylock is David Sze, whose investments include Facebook, LinkedIn and Pandora.

During a visit to Greylock’s shiny new Sand Hill Road office, I set the video camera rolling to ask Hoffman and Sze to look into their crystal balls and predict what the social Web has in store. They tag-teamed that first question with barely a pause in the 11-minute conversation captured here.

Here are some of Hoffman and Sze’s predictions and observations:

As investors in Gowalla and Facebook, they’re both bullish on location-based services, with Hoffman using his “sooner and stranger than you think” line to explain when location-sharing could become a mainstream activity.
“People are still learning that participating with your real identity and data about you in these public networks is actually very beneficial,” said Hoffman. He asserted that “the empowerment of the individual increases the liquidity of the individual.”
Sze is looking forward to “the integration of physical and virtual experiences,” citing examples like Fitbit and virtual gaming.
Hoffman on the two most important aspects of online privacy: “People want upsides, and people want to not be ambushed.”
Sze said he thinks the social Web has successfully countered societal “fear of the computer isolating us.” Technology is “a much more powerful way to connect us than not,” he said.
Hoffman proposed that the social layer can create broader engagement in a way that changes entire categories of businesses, using the obvious example of gaming and Zynga, but also citing recent Greylock investment Airbnb, where there’s a social aspect within the system of deciding to whom you rent your home.
Sze is interested in observing and investing in more examples of using network effects to improve work, mentioning the examples of LiveOps and Mechanical Turk.

[ See post to watch video ]

Jeff Bezos, Spark Capital, Bet on Aviary, a Web-Based Would-Be Adobe

Peter Kafka — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:00:49 +0000

Last week, Jeff Bezos made $2 billion in one day, courtesy of a massive spike in Amazon shares. What will he do with the extra dough?

Perhaps plow it into more start-ups like Aviary, a Long Island-based design software company.

Bezos, via his Bezos Expeditions fund, has followed up an investment in the company earlier this year with another slug of cash. It’s part of a $7 million Series B round led by Spark Capital, best known in these parts as the guys who made a very big bet on Twitter, which Bezos also invested in.

If you’re sick of hearing about Web start-ups with just the vaguest sense of a business plan, Aviary may be a refreshing change. It is trying to make money by selling cheap, Web-based alternatives to popular, expensive design software, primarily the stuff that Adobe (ADBE) sells, like Photoshop and Illustrator. Granted, it doesn’t make much money yet: The company only began selling $24.95 subscriptions to its software suite earlier this year.

Down the line, Aviary also imagines it will be able to create an online marketplace where the creative types who use its software can bid on work assignments. Sort of like eBay (EBAY) meets Craigslist meets Etsy meets Amazon’s (AMZN) own Mechanical Turk.

Here’s the full press release:

Aviary Secures $7 Million in Series B Financing Led by Spark Capital

Provider of Creative Application Suite in the Cloud Makes Creation Accessible to All and Advances the Growing Digital Economy

LONG ISLAND, New York (October 26, 2009) – Aviary, Inc., a pioneer of a creative application suite in the cloud, today announced that it has received $7 million in Series B financing led by Spark Capital, with participation from existing investors, including Bezos Expeditions, a personal investment company of Jeff Bezos. With a suite of digital creation and editing software available as an online service, Aviary offers a simple and cost-effective solution for creators of all genres–from graphic design to audio editing – to express their creative talents and participate in the burgeoning market for digital goods. In conjunction with the investment, Mo Koyfman of Spark Capital will be joining Aviary’s board of directors.

“Aviary’s robust suite of online creative tools is fundamentally democratizing digital creation. Whereas the market for digital goods was once reserved exclusively for creators using proprietary desktop software, Aviary is delivering creative applications that allow anyone with a browser to participate,” said Koyfman. “And by doing so in the cloud, Aviary allows for seamless online creation, collaboration, distribution and ultimately monetization previously not possible. The Aviary model has the potential to exponentially increase the number of creators and collaborators contributing to the digital economy.”

Until now, the digital creation market has been largely dominated by desktop software solutions which are often cost prohibitive and involve complicated interfaces. By contrast, Aviary offers a powerful creative toolset in the cloud that enables professional and amateur creators alike to easily create their own digital works. The basic Aviary suite is available for free to users and includes an image editor, vector editor, audio editor and more. Users can also upgrade to the pro suite to gain commercial features such as unlimited private storage, as well as collaboration and community enhancements. For more information, visit http://aviary.com/.

“We are disrupting the status quo by eliminating the long-held barriers to digital creation and giving creators the tools they need to create, market and monetize their vision,” said Avi Muchnick, founder & CEO of Aviary, Inc. “We are extremely excited to have Spark Capital on board. Their broad-ranging internet, software and consumer experience will be a tremendous asset to us in furthering our mission to make creation accessible to creators of all genres.”

New Clues About Missing Aviator Fossett–Whom the Internet Has Tried to Find–Discovered by Analog Hiker

Kara Swisher — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:32:29 +0000

A man hiking in a remote part of Mammoth Lakes in California’s Sierra Nevada found a pilot’s license and an FAA card, both bearing the name of aviator Steve Fossett.

Authorities are now trying to verify the IDs and other items for authenticity. No human remains or plane pieces were found nearby so far, although a fleece pullover and some money were also retrieved in the same area.

The discovery is about 50 miles away from Nevada desert locations where teams had been searching for the well-known adventurer, who vanished while on a solo flight in a single-engine Bellanca Super Decathlon a year ago.

It has been assumed that Fossett, who has since been declared legally dead, crashed, and the search for him was suspended a month ago.

After Fossett’s disappearance, tens of thousands of Web users mounted an unusual online search mission, studying satellite photographs of a huge swath of ground.

The images were uploaded by Amazon (AMZN) to its Mechanical Turk, in an attempt to find a possible crash site.

Google Earth (GOOG) was also used in the effort, which is called “crowdsourcing.”

The Turk was also used in another unsuccessful search for Microsoft (MSFT) techie Jim Gray, who went missing on a boat off the coast of California.

Computer-aided image-scanning technology has also been used in the search for Fossett, to no avail, until this very old-school break was made.