6 ms·

Playment (YC W17) gives companies on-demand workers to analyze data using mobile

34 points by rm2904 10y ago

nsx147 10y ago
Sounds like mechanical turk
- siddharthmall05 10y ago
  Three major differences 1) SLA (Quality and turn-around times) assurance 2) Fully managed solution. Just send us the data and guidelines, we take care of the rest. 3) Support complex workflows We wrote an elaborate piece on our differentiation against mechanical turk! Check it out on - https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk
ezzaf 10y ago
I was waiting for the "It's like mechanical turk, but for x" moment, but it didn't come. Perhaps a gamification twist given the name? Nope, apparently same same but more flexible for the workforce.
- akl01 10y ago
  Akshay here, co-founder of Playment. So there are quite a few differences, the primary being the quality & spam problem that mTurk has. We have a number of quality assurance models which help us promise enterprise grade SLAs to our customers. Moreover, mTurk is limited to requesters from a few countries. We don't have any such restriction. Also, Our product enables us to stitch together multiple tasks to model complex multi-step workflows so you don't need to take the hassle of setting up multiple tasks and compiling their results. Playment just does all of that for you. We've put up a comprehensive piece on this: https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ajinkyamalasane 10y ago
Hi Guys, I am Ajinkya (AJ) co-founder Playment. We started Playment as mTurk is highly unreliable in terms of data output quality or reliability. We focus on the standardisation of work across workers. In a nutshell we provide enterprise grade SLAs. We deploy algorithms to generate high quality crowdsourcing output rather just grading the workers. Building a mobile workforce makes us faster than any other existing mTurk like solution. It's an fully managed platform where the task requester needn't worry about the task design or worker selection or deciding worker incentives. Everything is managed by the platform itself. Just share the requirements and data and we do it all. The use cases that Playment target are cataloging for e-commerce, training data for AI (text classification, transcription, bounding boxes and image annotation). We have written a whole piece on Playment vs. mTurk - https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk Would appreciate more comments and remarks. Hope you find this useful.
- sarthakjain 10y ago
  Looks promising. AI still has time to go before it can automate complex tasks. Also training models requires a lot of data, labelled training data is a huge bottleneck. Are there any other use cases you have planned for AI training data?
  - siddharthmall05 10y ago
    Sid, Cofounder @ Playment here. Algorithms are only as good as the data that trains them. Besides having basic product features such as building bounding boxes on the images, identifying objects from images, context based text classification etc, we could also support multi step complex workflow. For example, for self driving cars, from a given image we could first find out if there are pedestrians present or not, then # of such pedestrians, then build boxes around it and finally tag them as males and females. To make it even more simple for our customers, we take over the complete ownership of building such complex workflows and ensuring quality.
    - mshubham1009 10y ago
mshubham1009 10y ago
Amazing, this thing has the capability to grow almost like Uber. This should definitely beat Mechanical Turk once it reaches scale.
theyeti 10y ago
Looks quite interesting. This could perhaps give Turkers a much needed alternative to Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
iamarsene 10y ago
This looks brilliant. How do you guarantee a fixed SLA ? I can see from your playstore app that your work force is non predictable as it is crowd-sourced ? Can you offer huge scale with limited downloads you have ?
- akl01 10y ago
  With the 100k+ downloads we always have thousands of people active on the app around the clock. We've been able to tag more than a million images in a day; and that's a fraction of our total capacity. And we've acquired these 100k downloads with zero marketing spend, so there's enough scope to get more workers pretty easily :)

34 points by rm2904 10y ago

nsx147 10y ago

Sounds like mechanical turk

siddharthmall05 10y ago
Three major differences 1) SLA (Quality and turn-around times) assurance 2) Fully managed solution. Just send us the data and guidelines, we take care of the rest. 3) Support complex workflows We wrote an elaborate piece on our differentiation against mechanical turk! Check it out on - https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk

ezzaf 10y ago

I was waiting for the "It's like mechanical turk, but for x" moment, but it didn't come. Perhaps a gamification twist given the name? Nope, apparently same same but more flexible for the workforce.

akl01 10y ago
Akshay here, co-founder of Playment. So there are quite a few differences, the primary being the quality & spam problem that mTurk has. We have a number of quality assurance models which help us promise enterprise grade SLAs to our customers. Moreover, mTurk is limited to requesters from a few countries. We don't have any such restriction. Also, Our product enables us to stitch together multiple tasks to model complex multi-step workflows so you don't need to take the hassle of setting up multiple tasks and compiling their results. Playment just does all of that for you. We've put up a comprehensive piece on this: https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ajinkyamalasane 10y ago

Hi Guys, I am Ajinkya (AJ) co-founder Playment. We started Playment as mTurk is highly unreliable in terms of data output quality or reliability. We focus on the standardisation of work across workers. In a nutshell we provide enterprise grade SLAs. We deploy algorithms to generate high quality crowdsourcing output rather just grading the workers. Building a mobile workforce makes us faster than any other existing mTurk like solution. It's an fully managed platform where the task requester needn't worry about the task design or worker selection or deciding worker incentives. Everything is managed by the platform itself. Just share the requirements and data and we do it all. The use cases that Playment target are cataloging for e-commerce, training data for AI (text classification, transcription, bounding boxes and image annotation). We have written a whole piece on Playment vs. mTurk - https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk https://playment.io/playment-vs-mechanical-turk Would appreciate more comments and remarks. Hope you find this useful.

sarthakjain 10y ago
Looks promising. AI still has time to go before it can automate complex tasks. Also training models requires a lot of data, labelled training data is a huge bottleneck. Are there any other use cases you have planned for AI training data?
- siddharthmall05 10y ago
  Sid, Cofounder @ Playment here. Algorithms are only as good as the data that trains them. Besides having basic product features such as building bounding boxes on the images, identifying objects from images, context based text classification etc, we could also support multi step complex workflow. For example, for self driving cars, from a given image we could first find out if there are pedestrians present or not, then # of such pedestrians, then build boxes around it and finally tag them as males and females. To make it even more simple for our customers, we take over the complete ownership of building such complex workflows and ensuring quality.
  - mshubham1009 10y ago

mshubham1009 10y ago

Amazing, this thing has the capability to grow almost like Uber. This should definitely beat Mechanical Turk once it reaches scale.

theyeti 10y ago

Looks quite interesting. This could perhaps give Turkers a much needed alternative to Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

iamarsene 10y ago

This looks brilliant. How do you guarantee a fixed SLA ? I can see from your playstore app that your work force is non predictable as it is crowd-sourced ? Can you offer huge scale with limited downloads you have ?

akl01 10y ago
With the 100k+ downloads we always have thousands of people active on the app around the clock. We've been able to tag more than a million images in a day; and that's a fraction of our total capacity. And we've acquired these 100k downloads with zero marketing spend, so there's enough scope to get more workers pretty easily :)