Twitter / Balaji Sowmyanarayan

Showing posts with label amazon web services. Show all posts
Showing posts with label amazon web services. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Sim-OnDemand - personal virtual world server, OpenSim on EC2

Idea:Sim-OnDemand - Personal Virtual World Server on Demand, on pay only for what you use billing.
Execution: Use the resource and bandwidth abundant Amazon EC2 infrastructure to deliver OpenSim on EC2 infrastructure. OpenSim opensource software packaged as ready to use Amazon Machine Image. The Sim-OnDemand comes with a GUI based launcher, making it easy for non-geeks to make use of Awesome Amazon infrastructure. No need to know Amazon API to use it.
Profit: The Amazon billing model of pay only for what you use and pass-through billing via DevPay are used to make it profitable for the user, publisher as well as Amazon.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Extending SecondLife Avatar Action to Real Life with Mturk

Idea: Avatar Voodo: Extending Avatar Action from SecondLife to Real Life
Execution: Avatar Voodo, Avoodo for short, is a mashup of SecondLife with Amazon Mturk. Avoodo is a way to extend/spill Avatar action to real world. The way it is done is, Avatar action is set to trigger posting of Human Intelligence Task(HIT) in Mturk market through Linden Scripting Language(LSL) scripts. The Linden dollar based micropayment mechanism is bridged to the Mturk based micropayment to make the HIT enticing enough for Mturk worker to complete. The HIT can be geographically targeted so that the SecondLife as geography barrier basher can be further enhanced.
Profit: One of the biggest complaint about SecondLife as a marketing medium is that it is just toyland and activities there and transactions there cannot be linked to real world and revenue generating commerce. With Avoodo, it is possible to engage the user in mixed reality play which can be a very effective marketing tool. For the seocndlife developers, they don't need to huge budget to create a mixed media experience like the CBS CSI:Virtual that involves huge hype and fanfare to work. As an illustrative case of the profit,

Teepu is an use case that uses Avoodo to give opportunity Avatars to participate in mass tree planting movement despite geographic barriers. In short, Avoodo, Treepu makes (digital/real) tree a social object for participation and conversation!.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Amazon Mturk earnings now in Indian Rupee:: Tap the housewife resource pool

Idea: Tap the housewife resource pool
Execution:There are a lot of household with a PC and internet connection sitting. Just decorating the living room. Where the kid plays the 'educational' game. And the grown ups use it for email and google. Now with mturk earnings available in Indian Rupee, the housewife glued to the TV serials, sob soaps can be given a gainful alternative. Mturk is part of suite of services opened up by Amazon Web Services as part of Jeff Bezeos strategy of increasing the utilization of Amazon installed capacity. To quote the Amazon FAQ on Mturk:

What is Amazon Mechanical Turk?

In 1769, Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen's "Turk" was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade skeptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinet's doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. What they did not know was the secret behind the Mechanical Turk: a human chess master cleverly concealed inside.

Today, we build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations. However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs—something children can do even before they learn to speak.

When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate "artificial artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. Behind the scenes, a network of humans fuels this artificial artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

All software developers need to do is write normal code. The pseudo-code below illustrates how simple this can be.

read (photo);
photoContainsHuman = callMechanicalTurk(photo);
if (photoContainsHuman == TRUE) {
acceptPhoto;
}
else {
rejectPhoto;
}


In a nutshell, Mturk is a way to give out tasks to the crowd and get the task done by a human. Typically, the task are too difficult for computer, but effortless for the human. The person accomplishing the task, gets paid. The Amazon's ecommerce system takes care of the trust, reputation, transaction etc.

Thus mturk can be used to give out work to housewifes, and the housewifes can do the task and get get paid, all risk free for both the work giver and the work doer.
Profit: The housewife of India are a talented lot. They give up pulme jobs to become housewife. They may be well qualified educationally. They can be meticulous in their work. Tapping this talent pool in a risk free way could be wonderful way to gain competitive advantage for businesses.