Press
San Francisco based Samasource is on a mission to help women, refugees and young people in developing countries earn a living wage on the Internet. And what’s more important is that these workers develop a long term relationship with Samasource. They work via local companies that organize and hire the workers and do quality control, and that model seems to work. Read more ...
The Puget Sound Business Journal announces the partnership between Samasource and Expedia's Travel Relief program, which will donate 8% of hotels bookings made through TravelRelief.org/samasource. Read more ...
The Standard speaks with a Samasource Service Partner, Ken Tech Data, about the growth in Kenyan Business Processing and Outsourcing companies (BPOs) in the international market. Read more ...
Our own Anar Simpson writes the endnote the Canadian magazine The Ismaili. She describes her time with Samasource when she helped bring on Service Partners in areas where it is difficult to operate, such as post-earthqauke Haiti and refugee camps in Kenya, Zambia and India. Read more ...
Leila Chirayath Janah is interviewed about Samasource after being recognized as one of the Most Influential Women in Technology of 2010 by Fast Company Magazine. Read more ...
April 20, 2010
Vator News
In light of earthquake in Haiti, crowdsourcing companies Crowdflower and Samasource collaborate with US State Department and Ushahidi to establish Mission 4636. Read more ...
Samasource get publicized for its collaboration with Ushahidi in crowdsourcing crisis information during the most recent earthquake in Haiti. Read more ...
A Kenyan newspaper, The Standard, covers Samasource's work and mission in the Daadab refugee camp. Read more ...
A takes a deeper look at Samasource - the brain-child of TED Fellow Leila Chirayath Janah - and the concept of microwork... Read more ...
Don Tennant blogs at 2010 Gateway to Innovation symposium in St. Louis, where Lloyd Taylor, former VP of technical operations at LinkedIn and current Samasource board memeber, gave an intriguing presentation on crowdsourcing. Read more ...
In this interview founder of Samasource, Leila Chirayath, discusses her personal views on social responsibility and the meaning behind her first tattoo. Read more ...
GoodGuide, Find Green, Give Work make Socialbrite’s Top 10 list Mobile applications are flooding the market at a dizzying rate — more than 150,000 now for the iPhone and tens of thousands for Android and Blackberry. And it’s important to keep in mind that only 18 percent of the phones in the United States are smart phones, as reported at yesterday’s Where 2.0 conference, so text-only SMS plays an important part in many of the campaigns run by nonprofits, NGOs and anyone interested in doing good. Read more ...
As the efforts to rebuild Haiti transition from emergency support to longer-term economic recovery and development, and just before the UNDP convenes a donor conference to address the crisis, I thought I'd share a few thoughts from recent talks and readings. Read more ...
March 30, 2010
Interview with Crowdflower CEO and co-founder Lukas Biewald on providing jobs
VatorNews
In this interview, Crowdflower co-founder and CEO Lukas Biewald talks about how 200,000 workers have found simple tasks on Crowdflower. The type of worker runs the gamut, Lukas said. Many of the workers have college degrees. At the same time, Crowdflower is working with Samasource, which helps "marginalized people from refugees in Kenya to women in rural Pakistan" to get small jobs. Read more ...
March 29, 2010
Students Use Texting Technology to Save Thousands in the Aftermath of the Haitian Earthquake
Conducive Chronicle
In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, thousands of volunteers from around the world rushed to the small island nation to lend their support to the relief efforts. The team at the Fletcher School at Tufts University is still doing everything they can to help. They are working with the Haitian Government, the Haitian Diaspora, and local Civil Society Groups who are using the Ushahidi platform to aid in the post-disaster reconstruction and development efforts. They are working with Samasource and Crowdflower to create jobs for the people of Haiti by hiring them as translators. Read more ...
Tech-minded volunteers quickly pitched in with a variety of communication and data services in the days following the Haiti earthquake. One company -- crowdsourcing platform CrowdFlower -- repurposed its service as a text-message translation tool to aid Mission 4636. CrowdFlower founder and CEO Lukas Biewald shares his story in this guest post. Read more ...
An hour's drive from Haiti's earthquake-ravaged capital of Port-au-Prince hums a cyber café, decked with dozens of new netbooks, intermittent Internet connectivity and hope. Read more ...
Heidi Minx documents Leila's visit to Dharamsala and the work Samasource is doing in there! Read more ...
Plein Ecran coverage of the Netexplorateur conference and awards in Paris Read more ...
February 27, 2010
Samasource Initiates Tibetan Employment Project in Dharamshala
The Tibetan Post International
Dharamshala: The non-profit organization Samasource yesterday began a data-processing employment program for Tibetans in Dharamsala. YC Dhardhowa, editor of the Tibet Post, talked to Samasource’s Chief Executive Officer, Leila Janah, and Heidi Minx of builtonrespect.com, who is involved in coordinating the project. Read more ...
February 19, 2010
In Haiti’s Hour of Need, Texting “4636” Became a Lifeline
Christopher Connell, US Government
Washington — Within hours of the earthquake that crushed Port-au-Prince January 12, Haitians in peril could send text messages for help over cell phones to a newly created emergency response number, 4636. It was the rough equivalent of the 911 emergency response number in the United States — and literally was set up overnight. Read more ...
Poor, dusty, overcrowded -- Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp (population: 300,000) is the last place you'd think to look for Web-savvy workers. But a growing number of camp dwellers are finding jobs in the digital economy thanks to Samasource, a San Francisco-based social enterprise. Read more ...
Le micro-job est-il l’avenir des pays sous-développés ? A l’occasion du Forum Netexplorateur, le 5 février dernier, les lauréats Lukas Biewald et Leila Chirayath Janah ont présenté Give Work, une application pour iPhone qui permet de donner du travail aux réfugiés de Dadaab, au Kenya. Read more ...
Le forum Netexplorateur, qui se réunit jeudi et vendredi au Sénat à Paris, se penche sur les technologies du futur susceptibles de bouleverser notre quotidien ou notre travail Read more ...
Parmi le Top 10 des précurseurs du web, l’ONG Samasource se démarque en alliant une proposition économiquement alléchante pour les entreprises occidentales et une élévation du niveau de vie pour des individus isolés des pays en développement. Read more ...
January 28, 2010
How a tweet brought makeshift 911 services to life in Haiti
Kim-Mai Cutler, Venture Beat
Two San Francisco-based startups, Crowdflower and Samasource, came on-board to help find volunteers to translate and categorize the messages. Both are in the “ Mechanical Turk” space — they farm out simple, rote tasks that computing can’t solve to thousands of people at a time. (Crowdflower is a venture-backed startup, while Samasource is a non-profit that gives this work to refugees and people in the poorest parts of the world, including Haiti.) Read more ...
Leila Chirayath Janah explains how her organization is helping to translate text messages from earthquake victims in Haiti so relief workers can better understand the conditions there. Her aim is to eventually give this translation work to Haitians, so they can jumpstart their recovery with jobs. Read more ...
January 19, 2010
Ushahidi: Citizen Reporting and the Haitian Relief Effort
Clark Boyd, Discovery News
With local cell service down and little chance of getting text messages out of Haiti, the Ushahidi team started by taking mapping information coming in from mainstream media outlets, and via Twitter (see hashtags #haiti and #haitiquake). They also created an email address where citizens could submit reports, or news of missing persons (haiti@ushahidi.com). Finally, and most critically, they reached out to Haiti's largest cell provider, DigiCel, to create a text message short code where citizens in Haiti could send an SMS about their location, and their needs. DigiCel allowed Ushahidi to use the short code 4636 (INFO). Read more ...
My organization, Samasource, is now working with FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi, and CrowdFlower to use CrowdFlower's platform to translate emergency text messages coming out of Haiti, which improves response times by aid workers on the ground. The exciting thing about this partnership? Very soon, Haitians in Mirebalais -- rather than expats in the US -- will be earning money for performing these translations Read more ...
January 17, 2010
Samasource and CrowdFlower in Haiti: Rebuilding After a Crisis
Leila Janah, Samasource
Together with the all-star team at Inveneo, we hope to work with 1,000 Jobs to maintain internet connectivity in Mirebalais and provide microwork opportunities to people who have lost their livelihoods. For more on what Samasource is doing in response to the crisis, please visit our blog, or follow us on Twitter @samasource. Please donate to support this effort. Read more ...
Txteagle - along with another company called Samasource that connects Kenyan refugees to crowdsourcing work - has found a population for whom a couple dollars a day is truly helpful. Read more ...
The overall message of the day: Social change is possible. Not only that, it's already happening--in small doses...Leila Chirayath Janah, founder of San Francisco nonprofit Samasource, talked about the thrill of providing refugees in Kenya with computer-based work commissioned by Silicon Valley companies.
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For the profit-oriented clients of socially responsible outsourcing, the benefits include a customer loyalty dividend. Leila is part of a group at Stanford University that works with CSR executives and multinationals such as Nike and Hewlett Packard. ‘We recently dis- cussed a study by MBA students that con- sumers are willing to pay 15 to 20 percent more for products if it has a social label on it – whether fair trade, or any kind of label that says that buying this is benefiting poor peo- ple, or the environment.’ Read more ...
Samasource is discussed beginning at 15:30:
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November 16, 2009
Samasource: How African refugees are scoring Silicon Valley Internet jobs
Lisa Katayama, Boing Boing
On a scorching hot June day in northeastern Kenya, an hour west of the Kenyan-Somali border, Leila Chirayath Janah arrived at the Dabaab refugee settlement in an armed convoy. She was there on a mission: to connect jobless, displaced refugees to the rest of the world through legitimate Internet-based jobs. Read more ...
Leila Chirayath Janah started the non-profit social enterprise Samasource that brings computer-based work to the world’s poor, making outsourcing a tool for development. Read more ...
Samasource is a San Francisco based non-profit that matches businesses in the United States with people in the developing world that are looking for work. The idea is that socially responsible companies here can farm out “microwork” (small bits of labor that can be done anywhere, at any time, via computers and the Internet) to people who are living in poverty, but can be easily trained to do such work. Marco Werman speaks with Leila Janah, the founder of Samasource, and Antoine Ngeleka, one of Samasource’s trainees living in Zambia. Read more ...
Software developers displaced by war and living in a Kenyan refugee camp are getting the opportunity to use their skills thanks to an effort by outsourced service provider Samasource and CARE International. Read more ...
Countless entrepreneurs have been drawn onto Twitter. Perhaps it’s because the platform has been a hotbed for innovation, or maybe it’s the millions of potential connections that has made it so enticing. Regardless, there are a lot of great entrepreneurs tweeting about their experiences. That’s why we wanted to build this list of essential entrepreneurs to follow – to help you discover and connect with them. Read more ...
The next time you say you want to help make the world a better place, try putting your mobile where your mouth is. Combining the strengths of mobile technology, non-profit organizations and crowdsourcing (i.e. calling on members of the public to complete small tasks as part of a bigger project, like Wikipedia), new mobile-phone applications are making volunteer work all the more accessible. Read more ...
Earlier this year we covered txteagle, a service that aims to fight unemployment in the developing world by enabling mobile phone subscribers there to complete quick jobs via SMS. Operating on much the same principle, Samasource is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that connects workers in the developing world with computer-based tasks. Read more ...
This is truly the hottest iPhone app EVAH! Samasource and CrowdFlower have teamed up to present Give Work, their new iPhone application. Give Work lets you support refugees in Dadaab, Kenya—the world’s largest refugee site—in minutes by completing short, on-screen tasks. In this video interview, Leila Chirayath Janah, Founder of Samasource, and Lukas Biewald, Founder of CrowdFlower, tell us about this innovative new iPhone app Read more ...
The spread of information technology from laptops and computers to the world wide web and cellphones is helping people in impoverished nations earn money. The nonprofit group Samasource sees IT jobs for poor countries as a great source of economic growth in places like Kenya, where the organization is bringing IT jobs to refugees. Read more ...
October 15, 2009
In the news: A nonprofit brings tech jobs to Third World Refugees
Stephanie Spino, Everon Technology Insider
Refugees in Kenya are now finding Internet-based work that is not only bringing them out of poverty, but tripling what they could ever possibly learn before! Thanks to a nonprofit known as Samasource, workers stuck in the world’s largest refugee camp are given a chance to make some cash and improve their living conditions. Read more ...
It might sound like a pretty outlandish idea that an iPhone application can provide jobs for refugees in Kenya, but the folks behind the Give Work App are dreaming big, writes Erica Liepmann, Associate Editor at Causecast. Dadaab, Kenya is home to extreme poverty and the largest refugee camp in the world. Through the Give Work system, refugees in Dadaab receive Internet training and well-paying, dignified jobs. Read more ...
Think you have it tough in this stubborn, seemingly endless recession? I am not one to make light of the extremely tight job market in nearly every industrialized nation, but try getting a job in a Kenyan refugee camp. Read more ...
THE very poorest people on the planet have benefited little from the digital economy, but a pilot project in African refugee camps has hinted at how that might change. Refugees at the Dadaab camps in Kenya have been able to dramatically increase their income by tapping into a global demand for unskilled digital labour. Read more ...
Doleres labs, one of the blogs i follow recently posted about their new iPhone app they have launched called Give Work. The app was launched together with Sama Source, an organisation that routes ‘micro-work’ via computers and mobiles to the poverty striken refugees and people in Africa. Read more ...
Sustainable outsourcers Samasource, in conjunction with Crowdflower, have just launched Give Work, a new iPhone application that allows users to complete micro-tasks alongside refugees in Kenya, in the process creating a new source of income and opportunity. Read more ...
October 13, 2009
New iPhone App Makes Jobs For Refugees In Dedaab Kenya
Erica Liepmann, Causecast.org
It might sound like a pretty outlandish idea that an iPhone application can provide jobs for refugees in Kenya, but the folks behind the Give Work App are dreaming big! Read more ...
For the last few months, Mashable has been exploring the potential of social media for Social Good. We have seen the power of Twitter and Facebook utilized to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity (and to potentially raise $1 million to fight cancer). But now we’ve learned of another use of social media for social good, and it does not involve raising money for charity. This morning, the Give Work iPhone app (iTunes Link) became available in the app store. Read more ...
Two San Francisco-based startups — Samasource and CrowdFlower — today released a free iPhone application in the iTunes App Store called Give Work that lets you spend a few seconds of your time helping Kenyan refugees earn money, and in turn, improve their quality of life. Read more ...
October 13, 2009
Crowdsourcing Startup Turns To An iPhone App To Boost Refugee Wages
Joe Tartakoff, mocoNews
For several months now, some 200 Kenyan refugees in the Dadaab camps have been helping foreign companies with a range of repetitive online tasks. But sometimes the quality of the work can suffer in part because of translation. “They speak English, but might not know slang,” says Lukas Biewald, who is CEO of CrowdFlower, a San Francisco-based crowdsourcing startup that recruits thousands of people to complete repetitive tasks for big companies and is overseeing the work. CrowdFlower is hoping a new iPhone app will address that issue. Read more ...
The iPhone is a pretty good way to kill short bursts of idle time — for example, I picked up an addiction to Apple’s Poker game after I started playing a couple times a day while I waited for buses. Now there’s an app called Give Work that lets you fill that time by helping refugees in Kenya, developed by startups CrowdFlower and Samasource. Read more ...
Samasource is a company that utilizes the Internet to bring job opportunities to marginalized individuals, including refugees. Its new Refugee Work Program, created in conjunction with CrowdFlower, aims to bring these opportunities to people through its new iPhone application. The new iPhone app is called Give Work, and it leverages its crowdsourcing technology to connect users with refugees in search of a job. Give Work is designed specifically for refugees at one of the world’s largest refugee sites, at the Dadaab, Kenya data center. Read more ...
October 13, 2009
Mechanical Turk app on the iPhone Provides Work for Refugees
Ben Lorica, O’Reilly Radar
Mechanical Turk service provider CrowdFlower and microwork non-profit Samasource have teamed up to make their services available to iPhone users. Users of CrowdFlower's mechanical turk platform can now opt to send their tasks to iPhone users. Previously, CrowdFlower users could choose between Amazon mechanical turks or CrowdFlower's stable of turks. The Give Work iPhone app takes tasks (created by real companies) and sends it to iPhone users who volunteer to complete them. Read more ...
A new free iPhone application, Give Work, released today lets iPhone users use their phones to provide work to refugees in Africa. The project, a collaboration of Samasource and Crowdflower, lets you support refugees working in a datacenter in Dadaab, Kenya — the world’s largest refugee site — through "micro-donations" of time, time, not money. Read more ...
The nonprofit organization demoed a Facebook App that allows application developers to outsource their quality testing to at-risk individuals in countries like Kenya, Cameroon and Ghana. Meanwhile, CrowdFlower is best known as a cloud-based work platform where companies offer Mechanical Turk-style jobs to online laborers. The company launched at this year's TechCrunch 50 event and describes itself as a "labor as a service" provider. Read more ...
Last week, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel at the Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas. The topic was: Online Locally, Act Globally. The panel, which included inspiring leaders in the field: • Jess McCarter – Vice President of Sales at Sama Source Read more ...
Workers stuck in the world's largest refugee camp are being given a chance to wield a mouse and keyboard as tools for digging their way out of poverty, and in the process, are helping out a series of small American companies looking to be more profitable. Read more ...
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) October 13, 2009 -- Samasource and CrowdFlower today announced the new Give Work iPhone application. iPhone users with a penchant for doing good can now use their phones to support refugees working in a Dadaab, Kenya datacenter - at the world's largest refugee site - by donating their time, not money. Read more ...
"Social enterpreneur Leila Chirayath Janah, founded Samasource in 2008 to bring computer-based training to people living in poverty in Africa and India. In this video interview, Leila tells us about Dadaab Refugee Camp on the border of Kenya and Somalia, where almost 300,000 people live in a camp built for only 90,000. Leila also shares the story of Samasource’s pilot program which trained sixteen youth to start providing online computer work." Read more ...
An interview with the folks at Development Crossing about how Samasource works, our mission, and sustainable development. Read more ...
“If you don’t find like-minded people, you can spend a lot of time looking for money and most people don’t want to take venture money until the valuations improve,” Leila Chirayath Janah of SamaSource, a non-profit organization that gets funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, told Reuters. It connects tech workers in Ghana and other developing countries with Silicon Valley companies like Facebook that outsource their testing. Read more ...
It’s a brave person that helms a nascent non-profit in this economic climate, but Samasource, a San Francisco-based company that matches small businesses with skilled workers in developing countries, is in good hands. Read more ...
Before I left for Cameroon, I had started doing a little of my own research via blogs and Twitter to learn a bit more about ICT4D in the Cameroonian setting. I wanted to get a feel for what the situation was so I'd be more in tune and also to see if there were any potential partners or people on the ground who I could learn from or link with Plan Cameroon. Read more ...
July 22, 2009
Stanford Scholar Leila Chirayath Janah With Unconventional Cure for What Ails the Global Economy
Free-Press-Release.com
Leila Chirayath Janah , founder and CEO of Samasource, a California-based non-profit that partners with small, talented, tech companies in poor and rural communities to find them clients, will be a special guest on the Friday morning (9 AM PDT / 12 Noon EDT) edition of Hugh Macken, Live! at BlogTalkRadio.com/Hugh. Read more ...
Today fbFund REV officially kicked off. And we're continuing our look into this year's 2009 fbFund REV winners by turning our attention to Samasource, one of the two nonprofit organizations that were selected as finalists. Read more ...
Facebook has just announced the 20 final winners of the latest round of fbFund, the joint entity created by Accel Parnters and Founders Fund in conjunction with the social network to help foster quality applications on Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect.. This round's winners will be invited to join a special Facebook startup incubator in downtown Palo Alto this summer. Read more ...
January 27, 2009
Samasource wins second prize of the Stanford E-Challenge
Chelsea Ma, Stanford Daily
The Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) launches its Social-E and E-Challenge competitions tonight.
Starting tonight, ideas will be exchanged, students will network and the beginnings of startups will form.
Read more ...
