2. Dolores Labs’ involvement in helping to create a system for delivering humanitarian aid to the people of Haiti after the 2010 earthquake illustrates how a high-tech business can benefit society in a “high-touch” way. What other kinds of projects could a company like Dolores Labs undertake that would create similar impact?

Software developer Lukas Biewald had a problem at the office. He needed an army of temporary workers to tackle a simple but huge task that couldn’t be automated. However, he had neither the time nor the budget to work with a conventional temp agency to engage the workers. Instead, Biewald turned to Mechanical Turk, the online labor force operated by Amazon, for his temp workers. At Mechanical Turk, for about $2 an hour, employers can hire large numbers of freelancers (called “turkers”) for a variety of menial tasks.
There was just one drawback, though: Biewald needed the work to be accurate, and he didn’t have time to monitor the quality of the output he would receive.
Biewald’s unmet need—for someone to assure an accurate, efficient labor force for his assignment—sparked the idea that eventually led him, in 2007, to found Dolores Labs: a business that, you could say, was born out of necessity.
San Francisco–based Dolores Labs serves as a middleman between the emerging cadre of “cloud labor”—the thousands of online moonlighters available to do simple tasks at bargain-basement hourly rates—and the organizations that want to hire them. The company fills the need by ensuring accountability and quality output from the cloud labor.