Smash Notes

Back to reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn, with Luis von Ahn.

What Happened When People Typed Captures for the New York Times?

Because Facebook was already using their capture, typing captures for about a week could digitize a whole year of the New York Times. The crowd did the reading work while signing up, so a year of the paper moved far faster than hiring people to type it.

Transcript

reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn ·

How I Built This with Guy Raz

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  1. Why Did He Spend Weekends at the Candy Factory?He liked the machines more than the candy.
  2. What Happened When His Aunt Was Kidnapped?When he was 15 or so, his aunt was kidnapped for ransom and was gone for seven or eight days.
  3. How Do You Stop Programs From Opening Free Email Accounts?Programs could get a 1,000,000 email accounts per day because they work fast and never get bored, while humans cannot open many accounts.
  4. How Did They Plan to Make Free Language Lessons Pay for Themselves?They would give the service entirely for free, have learners help translate material for companies such as CNN, and sell those translations so the lessons…
  5. How Much Outside Money Did They Raise in That First Round?The first outside financing was 3.3 million, described as a normal series.
  6. What Happened to Duolingo News Translation Contracts?By 2013 there were 15 million users, but news-organization contracts were not sustainable.
  7. How Did Paid Subscriptions Compare With Advertising?A paid plan at 9 99 per month, sold so people could avoid ads, brought in a ton more money than ads.

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