We pushed a major release in late March. This release included a system stability upgrade. Ironically, this release also included a devious little bug that messed up our image statuses. This lead many of our customers to believe that their images were “stuck” in the tagging process. This was a very illusive bug. Our engineers worked many hours to resolve this issue and fix the images that were effected.

All is working smoothly again. Thanks for your patience.

Regards,
Matt Nichols, CTO

This has been an exciting year for us at TagCow already. In March, we released the largest set of new features since our launch in 2008. These improvements include:

• A new customer dashboard
• Improved navigation
• Publicly available API
• System reliability improvements
• The official launch of our Content Filtering product

A recent follow-on release included a major upgrade to our tagging process. This has already started to produce higher quality taggings for our customers.

We have many great new features planned. I’ll follow up with a sneak peak post about some of the features that we have planned for the coming months. Stay tuned!

Regards,
Matt Nichols, CTO

We continue to make significant progress on-boarding companies to our Enterprise Tagging Platform. Last night I was doing a quick quality check on a job that was submitted for a well known museum and was completely floored by the quality of work that is being submitted by our workers. This enterprise tagging job had some serious challenges; first it requires a minimum of 10 tags per image and second a lot of the images are of simple objects from the museum (some of which are not very exciting). I tried tagging some of the images myself and could barely do it and definitely couldn’t do a very good job of it. With that I was a little afraid that we wouldn’t be able to produce quality results cost effectively but boy was I wrong. Below is an example image and subsequent tags submitted by one of our workers.  It’s not mind blowing, but it’s exactly what is called for (quality and cost effective).  

Oh yeah…and the main point of this post is to send out a huge THANK YOU to all of our workers. Without you we’re nothing. You enable everything we do. Tens of thousands of human taggers enabling enterprise tagging of millions and millions of images! Sweet!

Tags: abstract, industrial art, nonrepresentational, metal, sculpture, angular, geometric sharp, surfaces, steel, rust, weld, welds, welding, welded, punch hole

I can’t help but include this tagging example from our consumer service which reiterates the quality tagging done by our workers.

Tags: Michael Droz, mjdchild, 1980s, hungry hippos, batman, bop bag, crayola crayons, mickey mouse, candy, santa, christmas, gifts

Prior to changing our service over to a pay for play model we conducted a user survey of our free service and the results were very positive. They indicate that our users were generally excited, optimistic and satisfied with our service.  Using these data points we confidently started charging for our service. Not that we had a choice because the operational cost of the free service were killing us. The thing is once we made the switch to a pay model our users’ perception of quality made a 180 degree turn. Based on the declining daily registration numbers and negative feedback we got from our user base it was obvious that quality is a function of perception. When users didn’t have to pay they really liked our quality when we asked them to shell out for it they had a very different opinion. The good news is that it’s clear that if we improve the quality of our service users will pay.

Below are some of the highlights of that user survey: