Crowdsourcing Makes A Giant Leap

The endorsement for crowdsourced data processing provider WorkFusion in the form of new venture capital funding announced this week ratifies the innovative work this company is doing.

In addition, Tom Glocer, the former CEO of Thomson Reuters, is investing in WorkFusion along with new backer Mohr Davidow Ventures, and serving as an adviser to the company. As Glocer points out, WorkFusion (formerly CrowdComputing Systems) has gone a step beyond using algorithms to parse data or work with it, by using algorithms to assess what parts of the data work can be done by computers and what parts should be done by people.

"Ultimately, it will optimize the tasks being done by human beings all around the world," he says.

As previously reported, WorkFusion applies assembly line organization to producing data services. It's a different tack than outsourcing, as Glocer describes. "It takes the concept of variabilizing your costs one step further and says they don't actually have to be anybody's employees," he says. "There is a huge group of people who prefer only to work an hour a day or 20 minutes on a task. This platform enables parsing the work and getting it to them, but also doing quality work."

One might wonder why Glocer chose WorkFusion after leaving Thomson Reuters. The company's potential, as he sees it, is more than just becoming a technology or capability that is eventually sold to a data services provider and turned into a small cog in their engines.

"It very well could be a billion-dollar plus IPO company," says Glocer. "The reason it's potentially so large ... is the number of tasks required to keep [for example] tax accounting information up to date in every country around the world."

Certainly with Fatca's July 1 compliance deadline looming, among other regulatory milestones, reference data relevant to tax collection is a type of data that's growing in volume and could provide that size of a business. That became evident again on another international front, as the international government policy forum Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) just put forward its own project to collect and harmonize data relevant to tax collection in the form of transfer pricing.

Although this project doesn't currently carry the status of a regulatory mandate or requirement, it does suggest there could be more untapped areas of data that will propel what WorkFusion does beyond being just an embedded widget in others' systems.