Spare5 Joins The IBM Watson Ecosystem

SEATTLE, Oct. 22, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Spare5 announced today it has joined the IBM Watson Ecosystem, paving the way to develop applications across a broad range of industries including sports, retail, healthcare, and life sciences. Through this partnership, Spare5 will leverage human insights provided by its community of domain-specific specialists, with IBM Watson's cognitive computing, in order to train the system to understand, reason and assist people.

To kick-off the partnership, Spare5 demonstrated its core mobile expert sourcing techniques by unveiling the concept for a cognitive app titled "Watson Golf Pro." Watson Golf Pro has the potential to leverage IBM's deep learning, natural language, computer vision, personality insights and related capabilities to empower a personal golf pro that can coach the novice player. Building off the seasoned insights provided by Spare5's community of specialists and Watson's cognitive computing capabilities that allow it to "see" techniques such as a golfer's swing, the Watson Golf Pro app can witness and provide feedback to the advancing player.

As Lauri Saft, Vice President of the IBM Ecosystem, and Matt Bencke, Spare5 CEO, demonstrated at the #SportsFest Conference in New York City, the Watson Golf Pro concept demonstrates the potential to create a broad range of new business solutions by combining Spare5's unique micro-task platform with IBM Watson's powerful portfolio of 32 cognitive computing APIs. Spare5 sources domain-specific insights by paying people to complete fun, easy tasks that match their skills - wherever and whenever they like.

"Spare5 is a particularly outstanding new talent partner to welcome into our IBM Watson ecosystem," noted Saft. "What we love about Spare5 is that it provides high-quality, domain-specific human insights that IBM and our partners need in order to train Watson so it is fully equipped to enhance, scale and accelerate human expertise. Spare5 is innovating by curating and engaging its mobile-first community, and we are excited to work together starting today, on the brink of a revolution in cognitive computing."

Spare5 is committing to utilize Watson's cognitive computing APIs, while IBM is committing to promote Spare5 services and apply Watson technologies, thereby enabling it to develop solutions for IBM's customers.

"Cognitive computing is changing the way businesses understand, process and leverage the overwhelming amounts of data available today. This is particularly true of images, videos and audio clips, which present huge opportunity but also challenges. To take advantage of proliferate data, business leaders need insights they can count on," said Matt Bencke, CEO of Spare5. "Spare5's mobile-first, micro-task platform provides domain-specific insights with unprecedented quality, scale and specificity. Our proprietary assignment and quality algorithms provide the answers and confidence intervals companies need to drive their e-commerce, directory and other decision-making engines. In parallel, IBM Watson provides new processing technologies that are changing the way computers scale these insights. This potent combination of Human Insight and Cognitive Computing is truly a game changer." 

About Spare5

Spare5 scales the power of human intelligence to meet big data challenges that can't be solved by computers alone. Spare5 community members, referred to as Fives, tag photos, rate items, answer surveys, and perform other micro-tasks on their smartphones in their spare time for extra cash. For more information visit http://www.spare5.com.

IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing

Watson is the first open cognitive computing technology platform and represents a new era in computing where systems understand the world in the way that humans do: through senses, learning, and experience. Watson continuously learns, gaining in value and knowledge over time, from previous interactions. With the help of Watson, organizations are harnessing the power of cognitive computing to transform industries, help professionals do their jobs better, and solve important challenges.

To advance Watson, IBM has two dedicated business units: Watson, established for the development of cloud-delivered cognitive computing technologies that represent the commercialization of "artificial intelligence" or "AI" across a variety of industries, and Watson Health, dedicated to improving the ability of doctors, researchers and insurers and other related health organizations to surface new insights from data to and deliver personalized healthcare.

For more information on IBM Watson, visit: ibm.com/Watson and ibm.com/press/watson.

Join the conversation at #ibmwatson. Follow Watson on Facebook and see Watson on YouTube and Flickr.

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SOURCE Spare5

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