If you could earn virtual coin in exchange for doing simple real world tasks, would you do it? Now there's a way to find out: Gambit, a company that specializes in monetizing social gaming, has teamed with Crowdflower, which manages crowd-sourced tasks for clients to create a weirdly novel hybrid system. Players who complete tasks for Crowdflower companies can earn social gaming credits in exchange for their work. The system, dubbed Gambit Tasks, is a simple mechanical turk-like problem-solver. As Gambit puts it, imagine a Crowdflower client company has thousands of images it needs checking for copyright. They'd submit the task to Crowdflower, who'd forward it to Gambit and it would appear as an offer to Gambit game players. Basically, instead of relying on advertising or strangely spam-like commercial product tie-ins as some social gaming sites are doing (like the controversial Zynga games on Facebook) Gambit has realized there's money to be made by renting-out its gamers' time. From... - stephen