Friday, February 20, 2009

Amazon Web Services Part II - Impact on the Enterprise

Image representing Mechanical Turk as depicted...Image via CrunchBase

This week, I also tried out SmartSheet -- a new service for collaboration and project management. Looks like a good service with a number of useful features -- what really impressed me was the SmartSource feature that integrated with Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

A colleague asked for some helping doing some supply chain and financial analysis but only provided the supply chain data. The client wanted 10 years of financial data used and while I could have used my spare time to poke thru various SEC filings, I instead "Smartsourced" the request thru Smartsheet. That is, I built a spreadsheet of what information I wanted with the attributes (COGS, Sales, etc -- 1998, 1999,....) and went to lunch. I specified I wanted 2 answers for each variable (to check). About 3 pm I checked my account and all the answers were there.

Not bad for a few dollars and avoiding an hour or two of tedious work that could have stretched over 1 day or more due to interruptions..

Will definitely look for more opportunities to use this service.


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good to hear. More improvements being added to the Smartsource feature early next week. Should further simplify the management and re-submission of Amazon Turk requests made through Smartsheet.