Ross • 31st Jan 2010 • Thinking • computers, computing, development, dharavi, economy, slums, technology, work
I am interested in the potential of boosting wages in slums by setting up IT centres so that locals can work via Mechanical Turk, and similar services. Although these jobs pay below UK minimum wage, it would be multiples of a typical slum-dweller’s income. It appears that this is not a new idea. Some firms have gone a stage further and distributed this work by mobile phone, broadening reach. However the benefit of a single location is that you don’t rely on the worker having a phone, and that you could combine work with education and IT literacy classes.
Ross • 6th Oct 2009 • Learning, Living, Thinking • computing, economics, grid computing, ideas, internet, market, marketplace, technology
I think of a number of ideas about new concepts, products and companies every day. The overwhelming majority of these ideas are terrible. However, occasionally I think of something worth developing further. My first step is to check to see if I got there too late. A couple of quick Google searches and normally I will have proved that there are indeed no new things under the sun.
This morning I thought: “What if, instead of donating your surplus computing capacity (idle processor time, storage or bandwidth) to a project like Seti@home, you could set a price for that capacity and trade it on a global marketplace? You could enter your input prices, which would mainly reflect your power/energy costs, and then the market would allocate computing tasks in an efficient manner.”
I followed it up further and I am far from the first person to have this idea, it seems.
- The GridEcon Research Project exploring “a marketplace for computing resources” (PDF)
- “Compute Power Market: Towards a Market-Orientated Grid” (PDF)
- Zimory, a (live?) German system
I am not annoyed that I didn’t get there first – in retrospect, it’s an obvious idea. I would, however, have been annoyed if I had put time into this idea before realising that others were working on it. In this way, the internet saves me years of thinking time.
