Crowdsourcing: How free micro-labor can do the impossible. Luis von Ahn with a funny and fascinating view of how voluntarily linking millions of human brains can painlessly do massive scale tasks.

Crowdsourcing, or mass human computation, is a new discipline and has already had three annual conferences, and an industry rapidly forming around the commercial and fundraising  applications. Meanwhile, Luis von Ahn the man who brought you those annoying distorted web security words, or CAPTCHAs, and then found a way to make the ten seconds you spend typing them be the labor source for digitizing millions of books, has now found a way to use free labor to rapidly and accurately translate the entire web. Yes, that's right - the entire web- for free by offering potentially millions of people a free and effective way to become multi-lingual, and most amazingly it actually makes good solid sense as a business model!

He is natural, funny, and a totally innovative and revolutionary thinker.

 Before the Internet, coordinating more than 100,000 people, let alone paying them, was essentially impossible. But now with the Internet, I’ve just shown you a project where we’ve gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge.” (Luis von Ahn

http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html 

 "After re-purposing CAPTCHA so each human-typed response helps digitize books, Luis von Ahn wondered how else to use small contributions by many on the Internet for greater good. At TEDxCMU, he shares how his ambitious new project, Duolingo, will help millions learn a new language while translating the Web quickly and accurately -- all for free"