Apple offers micropayments to people who improve Apple Maps

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Apple is made of money.
Apple could soon offer a way to pay off those iPhone bills.
Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

Want to earn money and help out your favorite tech company? According to a new report, Apple has created a Mechanical Turk-style web app that lets people sign up and help improve Apple Maps for money.

People in the program reportedly earn about 54 cents per task (correcting or verifying a placemark in Apple Maps), with a maximum of 600 tasks every seven days. That’s about $324 per week — which is roughly in line with U.S. minimum wage for a full-time job, minus any additional benefits.

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A look at the web app’s interface.
Photo: iGeneration

Apple is said to have launched the “TryRating” system in the middle of last year. Since then, it’s been modifying its various verification rules, and is now ready to roll the service out to more customers. The report suggests this will happen in June, so there’s a small chance it could get mentioned at WWDC next week.

Apple has been looking for ways to improve its mapping software for years. Launched in 2012, Apple Maps was one of the notorious botches in Apple history, leading to the departure of Apple exec Scott Forstall. Maps’ problems ranged from depicting horribly warped landscapes to directing folks visiting the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska, to drive across one of the taxiways.

Since then, Maps has improved enormously. For several years, Apple has been updating the service every single day to try and keep it current, while it’s also investigated technologies like drones and mapping cars for keeping it current. Incentivizing people to keep Maps up to date through micropayments would be one more way to do this.

At present, no more details are known about the service — including whether Apple would later open up its “TryRating” service to customers wanting to farm out their own micropayment tasks, or if Apple has other services it also wants to improve through similar means.

Source: iGeneration

Via: 9to5Mac

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