One of the web’s master entrepreneurs has devised a novel way to expand his domain.
Jeff Bezos explains how Amazon, already home to 59 million active customers worldwide, hopes to beguile increasing numbers of developers to use web services that the company evolved for its own operations.
Bezos’ plan involves renting out the “guts of Amazon” -- the servers and software code and networking behind the online shopping giant. He describes a trio of services. The first, Mechanical Turk, named for a 19th century chess automaton (actually run by a human) “makes it possible to encode human intelligence inside a software application,” Bezos informs us. At Amazon, Mechanical Turk employs simple software to allow individuals to “vote” on product detail pages to help eliminate duplicate images and products. Work traditionally done by an in-house unit can be performed by a distributed group of Internet users, at their own convenience and for little cost. Bezos is making this software routine available to outsiders now, for such applications as podcasting transcription.
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