Great points. I have personal connections in some poor rural areas of Kenya already (and already in that place, people are always asking, "How can I join?", both of me and of the current workers). My colleagues also have connections in a number of other developing countries where we could plant "seeds". How to grow the "crowd" from those seeds is an interesting problem, but not insurmountable, what with ever-increasing mobile phone/3G penetration and a mobile interface to our platform (lots of people in Kenya, for example, have a low end mobile phone or internet-capable "feature phone" while still living in mud huts), a franchise model using netbooks and small solar stations, etc.

As for quality control, you're absolutely right. There are a lot of ways to approach that (none of which Mturk implements). There's some well-established precedent for methods that work, so we feel confident we can generate high quality outputs.

Yeah, the whole time I was thinking, "Hasn't the guy heard of Mechanical Turk?'

I guess he could be using MTurk as a platform to do this on, although I don't know haw much Amazon eats of your profit.

How are you planning to reach out to the poorest of the poor in developing countries?

Could humans be also used for doing this? Something like: "If you find other people to join this system, you will get 10% of their reward."

Surely, this has a lot of negative connotations. This is what many scams do, because it is an efficient way to reach many people. To remove some connotations, perhaps the reward could be limited in time, for example you get 10% of other person's reward only for 2 years. (To make it certain nobody is promissing you to "find 10 more people, and then you don't have to work again, ever".)