Luis von Ahn’s Trajectory
von Ahn is the guy behind reCAPTCHA (digitizes books through those captcha gateways), and before that the Google Image Labeler (which turns labeling Google’s image index into a game). Now he’s building Duolingo, where users translate content online while learning languages.
Essentially, von Ahn has mastered the art of building interfaces to large databases that incentivize (loosely at best) users to unknowingly manipulate the contents in order to generate value for the owner of the database.
It’s interesting to see his trajectory slowly trend towards the participants rather than the database proprietor.
- Labeler. Purely for Google’s benefit (users get stupid points).
- reCAPTCHA. Served the public while providing service to webmasters.
- Duolingo. Users learn a valuable skill while translating the web.
Next step? Picture This.
-Shlok
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