Crowdsourcing

Steve Fossett was an American businessman and adventurer. Fossett was very successful in the financial securities sector, eventually creating his own firm around 1980. After many successful years in business, he began to seek adventure as he had when he was younger. In the 1990's his wealth allowed him to pursue outdoor adventure and aviation. This man flew airplanes and air balloons. He set many aviation records such as the first solo man to pilot an air balloon around the world in 2002 (after six attempts). By the year 2007, he had set over 120 records on airplanes, balloons, sail boats and other powered and non-powered crafts.

Late in 2005, Amazon launched a service called Mechanical Turk. The Mechanical Turk service was created by Venky Harinarayan, a very successful computer scientist and businessman. This new internet business concept allowed for businesses to pay for human intelligence by distributing tasks to be performed via the Internet, otherwise known as crowdsourcing. This idea of distributing work that could not be done by computers to users on the Internet became very successful and within about a year acquired over 100,000 registered workers in over 100 countries.

Steve Fossett and Amazon's Mechanical Turk tragically came together sometime early September 2007. Early on September 3rd, 2007 Steve Fossett set off on a light aircraft single engine airplane from an airfield near Smith Valley, Nevada. Several hours later, when Fossett failed to return from his flight, several unsuccessful search parties were sent out to search for him. The search party continued and eventually even Richard Branson of Virgin Group, a friend of Fossett, became part of the effort to find Steve Fossett. Branson's involvement led to Google lending support with satellite imagery.

On September 8th, Amazon's Mechanical Turk released high resolution digital satellite imagery of the potential crash area. The idea was to crowdsource the images in order to help lead search parties to potential crash sites. By September 11, 2007 over 50,000 users had reviewed over 300,000 images of the potential crash area. Unfortunately Steve Fossett was never found alive. A few scattered remains were eventually found near the crash area discovered high in the Eastern Sierra Nevada range in California on September 29, 2008.

Although Mechanical Turk was not successful at finding Steve Fossett, the idea of crowdsourcing or distributing work via the Internet proved effective. This concept of using the Internet as a collective resource left a lasting impression on me. Several years later, when I learned of Bitcoin and its distributed ledger and blockchain mining it quickly reminded me of Mechanical Turk and the search for Steve Fossett by distributing vast amounts of images to be perused by many viewers across the Internet. The major difference here of course is that with Bitcoin, it is computers that are doing the work via the Internet, which of course is even better because that leaves humans with more leisure time, hopefully.

02/13/2018
@streetstyle
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