MobileWorks has its own workflow software, but it's also trying to solve the incentive problem by recruiting workers overseas, in developing nations like India, where low payments can still add up to meaningful income. Kulkarni, who founded the company in 2010 with fellow graduate students from the University of California, Berkeley, says the value of tasks is set so that workers can reasonably earn $2 to $4 an hour; payments are on a sliding scale, with lower rates for poorer countries. "Even though they are acting as agents of a computer program, we are creating an opportunity for them," he says. MobileWorks charges its clients rates starting at $5 per hour for workers' time.
Hamilton began doing microtasks about a month ago in Kingston. That is when MobileWorks struck a deal with Jamaica's government to promote this type of work, saying it could create 1,000 jobs in three months. Jamaica, which suffers from 14 percent unemployment, has the third-largest number of native English speakers in the Americas.
Hamilton isn't among Jamaica's jobless. She works for the government port authority as a procurement agent. That's also where she has been logging on to do microtasks. "I do it in my free time and when I have low amounts of work. I do it at my job," she says. So far, she's carried out tasks like collaborating with other remote workers to double-check a spreadsheet of admissions contacts for several thousand U.S. schools. Workers can rate data as correct, provide a different answer, or flag it for a supervisor. Her first 16 completed tasks, some of which took up to 10 minutes, have netted her a total of 85 cents.
Some of the work is a little shady. One person describing himself as a sociologist paid Hamilton a few cents to create a "believable" Twitter account. Her creation, Luke Lynch, who uses the handle
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