Did I find a Gem?

In my effort to find a gem in the thousands of ICOs, I stumbled upon Gems (https://gems.org/) .Yes. They are named as Gems, which is ironic. They are trying to revolutionise the Mechanical Turk industry. Those of you who don’t know what Mechanical Turk is, here is a simple description from Wikipedia.

“The Turk, also known as the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player (German: Schachtürke, “chess Turk”; Hungarian: A Török), was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854 it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hoax. Constructed and unveiled in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (Hungarian: Kempelen Farkas; 1734–1804) to impress the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, the mechanism appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent, as well as perform the knight’s tour, a puzzle that requires the player to move a knight to occupy every square of a chessboard exactly once.”

In the modern world (as per Wikipedia) Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace enabling individuals and businesses (known as Requesters) to coordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do. Employers are able to post jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk’s Terms of Service, or, more colloquially, Turkers) can then browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a monetary payment set by the employer. To place jobs, the requesting programs use an open application programming interface (API), or the more limited MTurk Requester site.

The problem with the current centralised platform is that a requester must provide a billing address in one of the approved countries. Amazon for instance has around 30 approved countries. By approving only 30 countries Amazon takes away the opportunity from citizens of several other countries who want to participate in this kind of economy.

The second and the most important problem is even workers from the approved countries are having issues receiving their payments. You can refer to the article by Miranda Katz from Wired here.

The centralised nature of these platforms and the fact that they use legacy payment methods like, sending check and bank transfers keeps millions of skilled Turks from participating in this economy.

Gems is trying to revolutionise this industry by solving problems around the payment solution and problems arising from the centralised nature of this industry.

In their own words, here is what Gems are trying to disrupt.

“Millions of people earn money online completing micro-tasks. Micro-tasks are simple online tasks that require human judgement like labelling objects and photos and are often times part of larger unified project like deep learning. Right now micro-task employers are over paying by 500 to 1500% and workers are being paid next to nothing. Where is the money going ? The reality is that socio economic inefficiencies are introduced by current centralised micro-task platforms, like Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower which ultimately hurts both workers and requesters. Issues plaguing the micro-task industry are plentiful. In order to ensure accurate results 5 to 15 workers are asked to perform the same tasks. Thus making the entire process economically inefficient. This wastefulness we call consensus by redundancy. Furthermore not having access to a bank account prevents millions of eligible workers from participating in the labor pool. Finally, existing market places often take out worths of 40% in fees. Introducing Gems, with the Gems protocol we envision a completely different world. The gems protocol allows anybody to tap in to the power of scalable micro-tasks workers without needing to worry about task verification, trust or payments. Gems eliminates consensus by redundancy through the use of staking and trust scoring mechanisms that ensures task accuracy and completion. Gems introduces a payment systems that reduces transaction fees and accessible to anybody in the world that is computer literate and has a working internet connection and gems cuts out the middlemen who take outrageous fees. What’s more any can build on top gems, creating innovative verification methods, decentralised applications or reusable task interfaces all with the benefits of gems protocol. Finally a global solution that benefits all network participants and makes micro tasks more efficient while treating everyone fairly. Gems, the protocol for decentralised mechanical turk.”

If they succeed in disrupting this industry it will be a great win for global citizens that currently lack access to Turk economy because of where they were born.

At the end of the day, I believe in people. Any project is as good as its founders and advisors.

A word about the Founders and Advisors:

Founding Team

Rory O’Reilly
Co-Founder
Rory studied psychology and economics at Harvard University. He left Harvard in 2014 to co-found gifs.com. Rory is a Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 under 30 recipient for his expertise in consumer tech. Before dropping out, Rory was named one of Harvard’s “most impressive” 19 students by Business Insider.

Kieran O’Reilly
Co-Founder
Kieran studied computer science at Harvard University. Prior to Gems, Kieran co-founded gifs.com as its CTO. Gifs.com is an online video editing and artificial intelligence company with clients such as Google, Netflix and Autodesk amongst others. Kieran was recognized by Forbes in their 30 under 30 list and is a Thiel Fellow.

Advisors:
Biz Stone
Co-Founder Twitter
Co-Founder Medium

Joey Krug
Pantera Capital
Co-Founder Augur

Ben Maurer
Co-Founder reCAPTCHA
Facebook

Luis Cuende
Co-Founder Aragon
Co-Founder Stampery

Joe Urgo
Co-Founder district0x
Founder Sourcerers

I have been trying to find a true use case of a decentralised block chain applications. In my opinion I found the first one in Gems.

Off to find more gems like this.