Amazon has a new service called Mechanical Turk. http://mturk.com . Its an interesting concept. Lets say you are travelling somewhere and want to to the research. Or you want to buy something and have questions. You want to know the answer to some random query. All these tasks are called “HIT” (Human Intelligence Task) in mturk world.
You put forward a task and assign a reward to that task. There are several volunteers all over the world who may pick up that task and do the research for you. Upon completion you can credit them with the reward promised. The rewards promised can be as low as a few cents.
You can also go to other side of table and sign up as a volunteer who will perform HIT for rewards. Could be good way to earn side income. Check out some of the HITs available for pickup.
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/findhits?match=false
We used this service two years ago at Ooyala to get feed back on video usage. There is another company provides the similar service http://vark.com/.
I was part of something similar to this for sometime (a few years ago) but it was around code development/consulting. Name eludes me at this time.