Mountain View, CA, May 4, 2011 — Gigwalk, the first on-demand mobile workforce, today announced the public launch of its new service that instantly connects businesses to a tech-savvy community who gets paid to use the free Gigwalk iPhone App to collect, capture and report real-world data while going about their everyday activities.

Emerging from a six-month private beta, the company has secured $1.7M in seed funding from some of the tech industry’s most successful venture capitalists, including AdMob investor Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal, Mint.com investor Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman of Greylock Discovery Fund. Also participating in the round is LiveOps co-founder Bill Trenchard of Founder Collective and Alex Lloyd of Accelerator Ventures.

“Gigwalk has brought together thousands of ‘feet-on-the-street,’ sparking an instant mobile workforce unlike any other to collect high-quality, accurate and timely on-location data for businesses,” said Ariel Seidman, CEO and co-founder of Gigwalk. “By transforming a growing legion of iPhone users into an on-demand mobile workforce, Gigwalk is creating a powerful new mobile economy where thousands of geographically distributed tasks can be completed in a matter of hours,” added Jeff Clavier, managing partner at SoftTech VC.

Gigwalk connects businesses to an instant mobile workforce, a community known as Gigwalkers. A Gigwalker completes a variety of paid, on-location tasks, or Gigs using their iPhone to verify a street name, photograph a menu, report on red-light cameras, confirm product placements in stores, and more.

Gigwalk clients range from Fortune 500 companies to local businesses across industries, including mapping, real-estate, local, consumer research, and retail. For example, TomTom, the world’s leading supplier of navigation products and services, recently used Gigwalk for verification of real-world dynamic map data attributes. The Gigwalk community quickly delivered fresh, geo-tagged photographic evidence to allow for an accurate and efficient means to update the TomTom database.

“Leveraging the Gigwalk community has allowed TomTom to cost-efficiently expand our mobile workforce and tap into local resources that can verify changes occurring in the real-world today,” stated Peter King, Regional Operations Manager for TomTom. “The Gigwalk community has proven it can be an integral component of our mission to continue to provide our customers with the freshest map products available.”

Gigwalk is currently active in seven metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Miami with more to come. Each city leverages a tech-savvy pool of Gigwalkers, who are earning as much as $1,600 per month—a second paycheck to many. As Gigwalkers accurately and timely complete Gigs, they increase their Streetcred (performance score) to unlock higher-paid Gigs.

Gigs typically range from $3 to $90 depending on the task and time needed to complete it. Gigwalk customers automatically post their Gigs and determine price. Then, Gigwalk’s proprietary algorithms push the Gig to the appropriate Gigwalker based on profile, location and past performance. Gigwalk customers only pay for quality results and thus, Gigwalkers consistently deliver—achieving a 93 percent success rate in accurately capturing real-world data.

About Gigwalk

Gigwalk instantly connects businesses to an on-demand, tech-savvy mobile workforce who gets paid to use their iPhone to collect, capture and report real-world data while going about their everyday activities. Gigwalk clients range from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses across industries, including mapping, real estate, local, travel, government, consumer research, and retail. A Gigwalker completes a variety of on-location, paid tasks or Gigs to verify a street name, photograph a menu, report on red-light cameras, confirm product placements in stores, and more. Gigwalk is currently active in eight major metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, and Seattle with more to come. The company is funded by some of the tech industry’s most successful venture capitalists;including AdMob investor Michael Dearing (Harrison Metal), Mint.com investor Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC) and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman (Greylock Discovery Fund), among others. Based in Mountain View, CA, more information on the company can be found at www.gigwalk.com.

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