tl;dr:
Be a rent-a-cop from the comfort of your couch! Eventum crowdsources live datastreams by achieving consensus about events amongst users. Their Alpha phase is taking place now, and I earned a hefty payout for participating; the final event is in just under 3 hours, at 17:40 GMT. To participate, watch security cam footage and report an event that occurs. If you're fast enough, you'll earn yourself some shiny ETH.
I am not including any referral links in this post, and don't benefit from your participation in Eventum's Alpha (other than via increased interest in Eventum in general and subsequent mooning of the tokens I've earned!).
Crowdsourcing the truth about death
Three days ago I earned 0.06 ETH and a fat stack of EVT tokens for watching a few minutes of a Dota 2 match. For the non-gamers here, Dota 2 is a multiplayer, online game where two teams defend their bases against one another. It's pretty brutal, with voiceovers screaming things like "Ma-ma-ma-Monster Kill" when a player is on a particularly impressive kill streak.
My mission: report ("vote", from a dropdown box) the name of the player who drew first blood (got the first kill), and the name of the poor bugger that died. The reward: a share in 6 ETH, if I voted before consensus was reached, and if my vote was the same as the consensus. Earlier voters receive a greater slice of the pie. I knew there would be stiff competition, but video games were my forte. I felt positive. It was the final match of a pro tournament, and there was a lot of commentary and analysis leading up to the match actually starting. Being Australian, I'm at a time zone disadvantage, and I was starting to fatigue... by the time the match started it was almost 2:00 AM, and I have a baby at home and had work in the morning. Finally, the match started, and then within the first 30 seconds (see the YouTube vid below), first blood was drawn—awesome, I could vote, and go to bed!
It turned out that I did pretty well. Once consensus is reached (at 283 votes in this case), some fancy stats and graphs are shown. I clocked in at number 31 of 283—not too shabby! I ended up scoring 0.0613 ETH and 9190 EVT (Eventum's tokens, which will be sold for 0.00007416 ETH each in the upcoming token sale. To begin with, the ETH is credited on the Ropsten Test Network, but after the token sale it'll show up on the Main network.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it: Be a rent-a-cop
The next (and I suspect final) Alpha event involves watching security camera footage, and voting about "suspicious activity". I wish I could participate, but it begins in just under 2 hours, at 17:40 GMT... it's already 2:30 AM here now, and I need to sleep. So it's up to you whether you want to take the opportunity yourself! This event has an 8 ETH payout. Give it a shot, and if you do, comment below to let me know what the suspicious activity was, and let me know how you went. If you need help getting set up with Metamask, this post is useful.
Pro tip: Speed really matters, and if you're handy with keyboard shortcuts, you can give yourself an edge over the competition. As soon as the voting dropdown box appears, focus it by clicking on it, and review the various options. Note that you can change the selected value of a dropdown box by typing the first letter of the relevant entry. If you need to make selections in multiple dropdowns, you can press Tab to navigate from the first to the second (and subsequent) dropdown. For the Dota example, I needed to make selections from two dropdowns, the first being the name of the killer, and the second the name of the victim. My strategy was to focus the first dropdown, and hover the mouse over the "Vote" button. As soon as I saw the first kill, I pressed the first letter of the killer's name (careful if there are multiple entries with the same first letter... you need to cycle through them by pressing the letter again), then Tab, then the first letter of the victim's name, and the clicked the mouse. I imagine that the Enter key would also submit the form, and would shave another 0.5 sec or so off your time.
This is my first post on Steemit (I'll introduce myself later). If you liked it, let me know and I’ll post more of this type of content.
glhf! 👍
Screenshots taken from Eventum Network's Alpha website and used with permission.