Software Out There

Software Out There - New York Times: "THE Internet is entering its Lego era. Amazon recently introduced an online storage service called S3, which offers data storage for a monthly fee of 15 cents a gigabyte.

Start-ups have begun to bypass the venture capital firms, relying instead on individual investors, called "angels," or out-of-pocket financing, largely because new ventures are not as expensive. For some, the new era of lightweight, lightning-fast software design is akin to a guerrilla movement rattling the walls of stodgy corporate development organizations. Even more striking is the suggestion that a broad transformation of software development might reverse the trend of outsourcing to India, where highly skilled but low-paid programmers are plentiful.

Web Services group recently introduced a service called the Mechanical Turk, an homage to an 18th-century chess-playing machine that was actually governed by a hidden human chess player. The idea behind the service is to find a simple way to organize and commercialize human brain power. Casting Words, is taking advantage of the Amazon service, known as Mturk, to offer automated transcription using human transcribers for less than half the cost of typical commercial online services."