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Partner Spotlight: Connotate

by Selene Arrozolo

Once upon a time the Internet was a place where humans went to look at “pages” of content. These days, however, more “machines” than humans are using the web and many of these little machines are powered by our partner Connotate. Connotate’s “Agents” keep track of billions of price changes, product specifications, people, and companies worldwide in real-time and turn passive website content into living data feeds that can be plugged into a myriad of applications and operational workflows, including data analytics, CRM, ERP, and other proprietary processes.

The impact of this cannot be overstated. You want to compare list prices versus street prices for Canon copiers worldwide? No problem. You want to know every time a realtor gets their license? Easy peasy. How about tracking which brands of medicine are covered by which insurance plans? Every oil drilling permit issued yesterday? Every company hiring engineers in Southern Illinois? The list of possibilities is literally endless.

Information Evolution partnered with Connotate three years ago specifically to monitor corporate executive bio pages for changes in real-time. Soon we realized that this simple use case was just the tip of the iceberg and we started building Agents to wade through mountains of publicly available data of all kinds, including:

  • News and Press Releases
  • Government Records
  • Product Information
  • Blog and Social Media Posts

These hard-working Agents power data feeds that are now embedded in the workflows of tens of thousands of working professionals. These feeds are the key to the functionality of all kinds of internal systems including:

  • Competitive Intelligence (pricing and product data)
  • Sales Intelligence (people and company contact data)
  • Current Awareness (news, sentiment, and other content)

As open data from the government continues to grow in volume and become more usable and valuable, the role for Connotate’s Agents will only continue to grow. We look forward to being a part of this growth and, dare we say, evolution.

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posted by Shyamali Ghosh on February 9, 2015

Crowdsourcing: Approaching Ubiquity

by Kevin Dodds

In 2010, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) posited the three conditions that would make crowdsourcing a common, everyday process. Over the last five years crowdsourcing has matured a lot, and it seems these three conditions have now been met.

These are the three requirements the authors suggested.

1. What interaction models and protocols do we need to lay the technical foundations between the ubiquitous computing systems and the crowd?

Technological infrastructure for crowdsourcing is now solidly in place. Amazon Mechanical Turk, eLance, and oDesk provide the marketplace for worker recruitment, interaction, and payment. Platforms like WorkFusion and Crowdflower allow complex process management.

2. How will crowdsourcing face quality assurance challenges while providing valuable incentive frameworks that encourage honest contributions?

Quality management mechanisms embedded in crowdsourcing platforms have improved dramatically since 2010. Credentialing routines ensure the performance of crowd workers on specific tasks before work starts. Data validation filters prevent the entry of invalid values. It’s also possible to constantly sample results for accuracy while processes are running. Crowdsourcing managers typically pay their best workers several times what random crowd workers receive to incentivize work on their processes. They also use in-house quality control staff to run post-processing routines, identifying and resolving any potential problems on their projects. This combination ensures quality control at the same level as in-house resources.

3. Finally, what are the novel applications of crowdsourcing enabled by ubiquitous computing systems?

Now that computing power is ubiquitous with 87% of individuals in the US having Internet access, crowdsourcing is useful for any number of creative tasks. Crowd volunteers review thousands of ocean images to find accident debris, identify criminals based on photographs, and monitor local water quality. Paid crowd workers can also now do a lot more than just simple micro-tasks. They conduct telephone surveys (with call recordings for quality assurance), write short descriptive blurbs, and analyze images to ensure they meet precise acceptability criteria.

Now that crowdsourcing has achieved ubiquity it’s hard to tell where it will go from here. There’s no doubt that it will continue to play an increasingly major role in the way we gather and process information.

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posted by Shyamali Ghosh on February 2, 2015

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