If you have a Facebook or Twitter, you’re familiar with what a CAPTCHA is. In fact, nearly 750 million people have completed them. What you might not know, however, is how much value they provide. According to Luis von Ahn (see video below), about 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed every day. But if one assumes 10 seconds wasted per CAPTCHA, that’s a total of 500,000 hours thrown out every day.
That’s a lot of hours.
But Luis was determined to do something great with his invention. Instead of just proving you’re human and moving on after filling out a CAPTCHA, Luis created the reCAPTCHA. The reCAPTCHA grabs a word from an untranslatable text and leverages your ability to decipher it in order to digitize the world’s knowledge. Today, 750 million people have translated at least one word, which is a little over 10 percent of the world’s population.
This massive collaboration is extraordinary. If you consider only 100,000 people contributed to landing a man on the moon, imagine what can be achieved with 10% of the population!
As with reCAPTCHA and sites like Wikipedia, we at Hyphos are working to unite humanity in order to solve some really large and very interesting problems. We’re currently in the middle of a redesign with which to launch soon. If you’d like to get involved, head over to hyphos.com and join our guestlist. We are extremely excited to give each and every one of you the power to make a meaningful contribution to the world’s knowledge and well-being.