The subject matter at Refresh Dallas was all about Amazon Web Services. This proved to be fairly irrelevant for me business-wise but yet interesting enough to keep my attention. The three services focused on the most were EC2, S3, and the Mechanical Turk. EC2 was a bit too developer related and S3 as a backup bulk storage service is still considered unstable because Amazon won’t comment on the future of the service. S3 sounds promising because the cost is so low and the method of transfer reaching torrent speeds is so fast, I think I will still try it without using any mission critical data.

Finally that leads us to the Mechanical Turk……Amazon’s version of artificial intelligience. The service is still in beta but there are some simple success stories from those that have used it. The system is a way to put out a request for a service/opinion that can’t be automated by a machine. The instance used last nite was tagging images with labels that only humans could describe such as a man having a beard. You can set up the project with a price you are willing to pay per image and the turks sign up for that project. Something like 200,000 images for $.10/image and you can have a whole catalog tagged and ready for indexing in a few days.

I can think of a few ways that this could be time-saving and very cost effective, especially when you have grunt work that can’t be handled by a snippet of code. Someone needs to create a platform for this that makes it easy to integrate it into proprietary systems and we can all begin to unleash the turks.

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