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Crowdsourcing

The Best Application of Crowdsourcing You Didn't Know AboutDecember 16 2008

Occasionally—just occasionally—I gloat. Shortly after writing the original Wired article on crowdsourcing, I predicted that the GPS navigation systems like those produced by TomTom and Garmin would eventually put their own customers to work improving their maps. This bit of prognostication didn't make it into my book, but I was happy to discover a TomTom executive attending a workshop on crowdsourcing I gave in Rotterdam a few months ago. Earlier this year the company launched a feature it calls MapShare, in which the TomTom user community collectively acts to provide updates and fixes to the map.

Today, a trademag covering the "sat-nav" industry ( a lovely British locution, that) notes that users have now made 5 million corrections. “To put this five million milestone in perspective: a one-hour trip made anywhere in Europe or North America will be influenced by twenty to thirty Map Share corrections,” said Corinne Vigreux, managing director TomTom.

Below, a graph charting growth of the MapShare community vis a vis growth of TomTom's user base generally:

 

A Boy Named Finn, Part IIDecember 12 2008

I hate to dilute the focus of the crowdsourcing blog by posting more personal accounts about my family's efforts to care for our developmentally delayed son. Still, I opened these barn doors myself, and have no regrets about it. We received invaluable information after that first blog post was reproduced on such sites as the Scholastic blog and Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab blog. So I decided I would publish one final update, as well as thank everyone who commented, emailed or republished the original post:

Yesterday we took Finn to one of the best pediatric neurologists in New York City. It didn't take him long to issue a diagnosis—Finn, he's quite sure, fits somewhere on the autism spectrum. And so we come to another twist on this bewildering road we're traveling. I'll be charting our progress on this journey, but not here. We've launched a separate blog—A Boy Named Finn—to perform that service. Next week Crowdsourcing.com will return to its regular programming—and content.

Guest Post: Exit Telecommuter—Enter CloudworkerDecember 6 2008

Besides being a regular correspondent and colleague, our guest blogger today, Venkatesh Rao, has the distinction of writing one of the most penetrating reviews of my book in print or online. Venkat does crowdsourcing research at Xerox, and has also been one of the most consistently interesting voices in the broad area of online collaboration, and I was pleased to have him contribute the following post. It's an open call for contributions to an interesting contest, but better, it's a thoughtful examination on how the crowd and the cloud, two overused and misunderstood terms, relate.

Crowdsourcing and Cloudworking

What happens when on-demand technology meets the crowd? You get the cloudworker: somebody who uses the power of work-anywhere-anytime technology to craft a my-size-fits-me career. Earlier this week, the not-for-profit site, cloudworker.org , launched in beta mode, with a contest that invites participants to submit anything they like—blogs, pictures of workspaces, videos, twitter feeds—that showcases their cloudworker lifestyles. The contest is rather festively titled "Light up your cloud." You can enter until December 28th (there's a bunch of cool prizes, including audio equipment, signed copies of the Crowdsourcing audiobook sponsored by Jeff, and signed copies of Adventures of Johnny Bunko, sponsored by Dan Pink). The plan for the site is to run monthly contests aimed at discovering, and perhaps inventing, the fu

Crowdsourcing: Now With a Real Business Model!December 3 2008

Venture capital is drying up, with less money flowing in fewer deals, but at least one company managed to score a tidy sum. On Tuesday uTest -- which crowdsources software testing -- announced it had secured $5 million in Series B financing.

What makes the news remarkable is that uTest is a crowdsourcing company. Hype notwithstanding, crowdsourcing hasn't yielded more than a few viable businesses in the last few years. We know crowdsourcing exists because we've seen it flourish in the wild, which is to say, a few entrepreneurs have stumbled into very profitable businesses by building vibrant communities first, and monetizing them later.

Breeding crowdsourcing in captivity -- creating instant communities for the purpose of making a quick buch -- has proven far more difficult.

So what makes uTest's investors -- the latest round was led by Longworth Venture Partners -- think it will be the exception?

Simplicity helps, as does the appeal of raw competition: The company allows its clients to post software to its community of testers, who then go about racing through the program looking for bugs. The spoils go to whoever spots a bug first.

And according to sources inside the company, it's already established an enviable track record. It stealth-launched back in February, and all ten of the pilot participants have been converted into paying clients. Its official launch came on August 19. uTes

Mumbai and the MediaDecember 2 2008

The coverage of the Mumbai attacks offered the bizarre and increasingly frequent spectacle: the news media reporting on its inadequacy. Within minutes of the first attacks, on-the-scene reports started appearing on Twitter, Flickr and citizen-media sites like NowPublic.com. Unencumbered by expensive cameras, skeptical editors or professional ethics, citizen journalists filled the breech during the early hours of the crisis, "while there was a vacuum of official information from government sources or from mainstream media outlets still struggling to understand the extent of the attacks," according to a somewhat breathless New York Times piece yesterday.

How fast was the crowd? I was in the office on Wednesday afternoon, sifting through a mountain of paperwork and generally ignoring my news feeds. "Jesus," exclaimed Noah Shachtman, from his cubicle here at Wired's New York offices. "Terrorist attacks in Mumbai." Less than an hour later Noah published this post to Wired's Danger Room blog, noting that dozens of videos (there are now hundreds) had been uploaded to YouTube, a GoogleMap showing attack sites had been created and blood donors could find out which blood bank to go to on Twitter. Also noted: The fact that Wikipedia was transformed from a reference site to a one-stop shop for the latest updates, a news aggregator nonpariel. (The page now runs over 6,000 words and contains 226 citations.) How fast was the crowd?