Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Sherry Leung sent me a link a very interesting site this week. Free Rice is a charity site that engages the user with a progressively more challenging vocabulary quiz.  For each correct answer, the site's sponsors will donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations.  When you combine feeding your brain with a wholesome distraction and the warm feeling of watching your rice bowl fill up, it's pretty addictive.  And it's hard work!

This got me thinking more generally about the power of the "human computer" to accomplish other tasks, and I rediscovered Luis von Ahn, an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon.  He was obsessed with all the human computational time "wasted" playing Solitaire, etc., and suggested that image recognition and tagging could be done by humans if it was placed in the context of a competitive game. This was the inspiration for the ESP Game, later licensed by Google Image Labeler.

The CAPTCHA technology was another von Ahn innovation (he's a MacArthur Fellow).  That's the maddening distorted text challenge boxes used to defeat spam bots.  He decided that this too was wasted human energy, and recently introduced reCAPTCHA.  Instead of serving up random letters, your challenge phrases are now snippets of text from a project to digitize old books.  You are providing the human intelligence where OCR has failed. 

I think there is some kind of metaphor here in terms of other experiences we create for consumers.  We are so scared of making the customer do any work- everything is supposed to be seamless and easy.  But sometimes, as the adage goes, hard work is its own reward.  Especially when you can create something of value for the customer.

Misha Cornes