With today’s launch of Gigwalk and the corresponding release of the free iPhone app, the startup gives you the chance to earn a few extra bucks by taking pictures with your phone. Companies can request photos, create “Gigs,” and the iPhone app notifies “Gigwalkers” so they can start shooting.
In the early days of your Gigwalker life, you’ll only see jobs that pay around $3. But if you complete enough of those jobs, and on a sufficiently frequent basis, you’ll unlock better paid and more complicated jobs. A very powerful yet simple concept that can earn you up to $50-$100 a month, says Gigwalk’s co-founder and CEO, Ariel Seidman.
As a company, you can create the gigs and set how much you want to pay for it. Gigwalk will then show your jobs to only those users who are qualified for your request. That means they have to be around the area you requested photos of, and they have to fulfill the requirements you set while creating the Gig. Companies all over the world can sign up for a Gig Basic account (starting at $5 a month) or contact Gigwalker to get a Gig Pro account. If you go for the Basic option, you can only request photos, while as a Pro user, you can request photos, ask questions, and you’ll have access to coming features like video and audio tasks.
For a company, the uses for this app can be very different. One of the beta customers was TomTom, who requested photos of street signs, one-way streets, and dead-ends. Spending just a few bucks for every job, the company got valuable real-time information for their turn-by-turn navigation systems.
But, information given by the app’s users don’t only help companies in the navigation sector, there are hundreds of ways to use Gigwalk. Shops, restaurants, hotels, and museums can ask for direct customer feedback. Just snapping photos of what the customer liked or didn’t like makes it easier for them to give that feedback to the company. And the easier it is to give feedback, the more likely it is that you’ll actually get it.
At the moment, companies can create Gigs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Miami. That means that only people living in these cities can actually start using the app and complete Gigs as of today.
Gigwalk’s success is obviously dependent on the companies and people using it. If companies don’t create Gigs, there won’t be much to do for the Gigwalkers, and if Gigwalkers won’t do the jobs, companies will stop creating them. The information companies can get for relatively little money is a promising concept. It will be very interesting to see how this use of the social-web’s capabilities develops alongside Gigwalk.
Article Via TechCrunch
