Playment gives companies on-demand workers to analyze data using mobile devices

Pretty much every company, to some extent, has to power their algorithms with data and machine learning if they're going to be competitive with anyone else in their space. The challenge there, though, is that not everyone can have the massive computational power and data of a company like Google -- especially not startups. Siddharth Mall and his co-founders started Playment in India based on that bet. Playment allows companies to send over sets of training data that need some kind of light analysis, and then divvies it up across a large on-demand workforce that can resolve those tasks on their mobile devices. That, in turn, feeds back additional data to the companies to help refine their algorithms -- whether that's visual search, quality checks of recommendation engines.