Monthly Archives: December 2005

Utah Geek dinner

Posted on by
1

Last night I went with Mike Triunfo to Utah Geek Dinner #2. The idea is to bring together all the programmers and technologists from around Utah to network and brainstorm. I also went to the 1st meeting and enjoyed both. Here are a few points from the meeting last night:

  • What happens at Geek Dinner stays at Geek Dinner. I.e., people at these gatherings should feel comfortable enough to talk about work and professional challenges without worrying their boss will be tipped off to a problem.
  • Phil Burns, COO of Provo Labs, brought up the idea of building a “geek community center”. It would have wireless internet access, tons of whiteboards and collaboration areas, a food court, a game room, business offices, and even office space for rent for as little as an hour or a day or a week (for startups.)
  • Utah Geek Dinners should be (technically) non-denominational. Open source people can intermingle with Microsofties, etc.
  • It was clear from the meeting that Utah has many talented technologists and cool companies.
  • These gatherings can be a great place for business owners and entrepreneurs to find programmers and for programmers to find jobs.
  • Everyone interested should put “devutah” in their list of Groups and Associations on Linkedin.com
  • Geek Dinners are intended to supplement not supplant user group meetings. Each user group was given time to make announcements, recruit people, and talk about upcoming meetings.

One of the sponsors and attendees was Jamis Buck, a top developer at one of my favorite companies. So to all you Web 2.0 companies looking for Ruby on Rails programmers in this new era of irrational exuberance: I sat 5 feet away from Jamis Buck. That ought to count for something.

Outsourcing the small stuff

Posted on by
5

When I was home for Thanksgiving break, my brothers told me that for a fee you can get Chinese kids to play video games for you. Why? Because some online adventure/role-playing games are so tedious and boring at times that you’d prefer to pay someone to beat those areas for you so you can enjoy the fun parts. I had no idea this existed, but this week the New York Times confirmed it: Ogre to Slay? Outsource it to China. It’s interesting how such a disparity in income can turn one man’s play into another man’s work. Only the internet could make this sort of arbitrage possible, and you have to feel good about this flow of disposable income to low-income countries.

On a similar note, Amazon.com recently introduced a service called the Mechanical Turk. It’s not really mechanical, but the name is based on a famous hoax from 18th century wherein a large machine was built to play chess against famous people (it beat Ben Franklin) but actually had a chess master inside.

Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk allows people to perform Human Intelligence Tasks for money. The tasks have little to do with being intelligent and everything to do with being human. Questions might include “What is written on this CD case?” or “Does this photo contain a grocery store?” They are tasks that would be difficult or impossible for a computer but which are easy for a human. And Amazon is willing to pay for them to be done. (Though not very much — I did it for 5 minutes and only made $0.15. I’m sure rates vary.) Some of the tasks are to double-check the tasks others have done. Amazon uses this information for its book search and A9 local search.

The interesting thing about the Mechanical Turk is that it could become a platform for outsourcing small tasks, perhaps especially to persons in 3rd world nations where the tasks, even in English, are doable and the money goes a lot further than it does here. I’ll be watching this one with curiosity.