Amazon recently unveiled a new “Web” service, called NowNow, that allows users to find answers to any question via mobile email. When users post a question to NowNow, a team of human workers surfs the web to find the answer. Users will get an email response with up to three answers to their question within just a few minutes. In the Beta test, all questions can be asked for free, though Amazon will eventually begin charging a small fee for each question asked.

The really cool part of this whole system is that it plugs into Amazon’s existing Mechanical Turk service, which we’ve covered before. Questions asked via NowNow get fed into the Mechanical Turk queue and are handled by those workers. Workers are paid based on the quality of their answers.

While some might argue that anyone with mobile access to email probably has mobile Web access as well, negating the need for the service, we think Amazon is exploring this territory because of the mobile Web’s current inability to truly mirror the desktop Web experience. Many mobile Web users find surfing and searching to be too slow to do on the fly – making the service pretty appealing in the mobile context. Stay tuned to see how this pans out. Learn more at NowNow.

Polaroids are like instant gifts from the good people at Kodak. Brilliant colours and a look completely of their own. Quicker than conventional film, yet a long enough processing time to allow the anticipation to build up to a suitable level. Usually used for quick snap, lately a strong group of artists seem to be popping up using them in a fantastically artistic way, without loosing that polaroid feel.

Mikael Kennedy, via the his blog, ladies and gents……

Mikael Kennedy 

I’m really starting to dig Amazon’s new mobile answer service, nownow.com. The concept is to allow mobile users to get answers to questions without having to search the web. They just e-mail nownow from their cell phone (SMS support coming soon), and the questioun is researched by Mechanical Turk workers. Up to 3 answers for each question sent and the user has the option to rate the answers in order to encourage quality over time.

I was a bit skeptical at first. The service is free during the invitaiton-only beta, but the yet-to-be-announced pricing could be as high as $0.25 per question. I can see how something simple like “What’s the phone number of Piecora’s pizza in Seattle?” would probably net accurate responses, but couldn’t see myself paying to receive 3 e-mails with the same number. What I didn’t expect, was the quality of answers for more detailed questions. For example, when I first heard about the lenghtening of daylight savings time in the US, I was at lunch. I sent in a question and within 15 minutes or so had 3 detailed and comprehensive answers on my cell phone.

Workers are paid $0.02-$0.03 per answer. That’s it. I was wondering why they would do such good research for so little, so I sent in a question and asked*. While anyone who goes to Mechanical Turk can answer a question, I get the sense that there’s a sort of community of people who work these on a regular basis. They mentioned the sense of helpfulness, knowing they are providing information that an individual needs (as opposed to something that will be aggregated, etc). There’s also a pool of bonus money that’s distributed each week to the workers with the most “great” answer votes. Unfortunatley, not everyone bothers to vote (one worker estimated about 1/3 vote). It’s as simple as replying to the email you receive with “great”, “like”, or “lame”. I’m going to bet a reminder to vote gets built into the system soon.