A few weeks ago, when we started exploring crowdsourcing together, I promised at the end of that article that I’d continue on the subject giving you some more examples (mainly to save from writing war and peace on the subject in one mammoth article).

So here it is – and I’m going to do that via some simple research.

p.s. if you want to learn more about what crowdsourcing is and have a bit of background to this article, go and read the previous article on this subject first: Crowdsourcing: What It Is, How It Works, Why You Should Care & How To Do It!

I’m off skipping around the internet and looking at various Crowdsourcing sites to give you (and me) more of an idea about just what can be and what is being done on the subject.

The Obvious Example: Google

By the way, I’m deliberately not including Google on my list, but if you think about it, Google (as in their primary function, the Google search engine) is probably the biggest and most successful example of crowdsourcing out there.

Think about it: armed with your search query, the Google search engine crawls the entire internet processing all that information and then presents you with an ordered list of information (ordered generally by currency and relevance) which best matches what you’re trying to find. Now that’s crowdsourcing.

In actual fact, for speed and efficiency, the process is really a short-cut version of the above – Google crawls the internet first, builds an ‘index’ which it can search faster and then pulls the results to match your query from that index – but in concept it’s the same thing as above.

So, anyway, even though Google is a great example of crowdsourcing and should probably be #1 in my list, it’s not in my list, I’m not even going to make my 10 Examples 11 to make room for it, I just thought I’d mention it separately because it is a huge example but one most people know about already.

We’re Just Scratching The Surface

As I just said, I didn’t want the previous article to be toooo long.

Buuuut, even here, we are still just scratching the surface.

I’ll tell you why…

I reckon you could go back in time and find plenty of examples of crowdsourcing from some years ago. In fact, one of the earliest examples is the making of the Oxford English Dictionary which had contributions from volunteers resulting in over 6 million submissions over a period of 70 years.

However… advances in technology have made it quicker and easier than ever to communicate, collaborate and share information and whereas we can find potted examples from the past such as the Oxford English Dictionary example, we can find numerous examples all around us today.

In this article I’m not going to attempt to categorize the examples, but I’ll just throw a few at you to show you what’s out there and get you thinking. In case you were wondering though, there are categories we could look at and these are broadly ‘crowdvoting’,crowd ‘wisdom’, ‘crowdfunding’ (this one’s quite a big area), ‘microwork’ and ‘design/creative crowdsourcing’. I’ll leave it to you to decide which of the examples below fall into which categories ;-).

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My 10 Interesting Crowdsourcing Examples

So here we go. I’m going to hop off this page any moment and start looking around for some more crowdsourcing examples. Back in a minute. I’ll throw any that don’t make my top 10, or that get demoted into a ‘The Rest’ section below so that you can get a very brief idea of what else is out there too, but as usual, let’s not let this get too long…

1. Amazon Mechanical Turk (mturk.com)

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is one of the first crowdsourcing sites to be created and now one of the biggest. It is termed ‘a marketplace for work’ and simple matches via internet technology tasks which can be organized and performed by a ‘crowd’ with people who wish to be part of the ‘crowd’ performing those tasks. Tasks or projects are organized into HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) and performed by Workers who choose them from a list. You can also of course post HITs to get results from workers.

Sometimes the human brain is better suited to a task than a computer – in these cases the tasks can be outsourced to Turk. There are currently around 50,000 ‘Human Intelligence Tasks’ (HITs) available for its freelance workforce, fees per task range from a couple of cents to $30 with Amazon taking a 10% commission.

Though this platform is well established, it has been criticized as some of the fees are so low as to be under the minimum wage, even for countries like India.

 

2. Crowdflower (crowdflower.com)

Instantly hire millions of people to collect, filter, and enhance your data.

Crowdflower is a crowd sourcing site which offers data analysis and processing solutions. The interface allows the user to upload data, questionnaires or instructions for people who will be working on that data and a sample set of correctly processed data (‘Gold’ data) which can be used for validation and to improve the quality of the results which come back.

 

3. Microtask (microtask.com)

Human powered document processing.

Microtask takes forms which are scanned, faxed or photgraphed with a mobile device and crowdsources the entry of the handwritten data in those forms. For added security, the system splits the forms into sections so that no individual entering the data has access to a complete form.

A useful service if you have lots of manual data entry to do from handwritten forms.

 

4. 99designs (99designs.com)

I already mentioned 99Designs in the first post on crowdsourcing, but they have to be in my list of 10 sites because they implement crowdsourcing really well.

In short, 99Designs works like a contest, you submit a brief and determine a fee for the contest winner (minimum is around $150), then sit back and watch the crowd go to work. Once you have all of the responses back, you can simply choose the design you like the best.

 

5. Kickstarter (kickstarter.com)

Kickstarter, is (at the time of writing this article) the biggest website for funding creative projects.

It has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, despite a business model which requires the person applying for the funding to reach their proposed monetary goal in order to acquire the money (i.e. it’s all of the money to start the project or no money at all, with the ability to raise the funds therefore cleverly forming part of the validation process for which projects actually go ahead).

 

6. Chaordix (chaordix.com)

Chaordix seems to be like a crowdsouring consultancy offering crowdsourcing solutions mainly in the area of market research and intelligence to businesses and governments.

Chaordix uses the power of crowdsourcing to help the world’s leading companies and organizations gain actionable insight and … leverage unique crowdsourcing techniques and technology to drive market research, brand loyalty and innovation. (from their about page).

 

7. Crowdrise (crowdrise.com)

Crowdrise is an online fundraising platform for individuals, charities and events.

It’s a well laid out and intuitive platform, like all good crowdsourcing solutions providing a common place for people to come together and pool their resources – in this case the information and admin around various events and the funding raised for that event.

 

8. Poptent (poptent.com)

Poptent enables collaboration between a vibrant community of filmmakers, actors, comedians, grips, animators and more who are connecting to each other and to companies that want to pay them for their talents to create advertising, commercials and branded messages for the Internet age.

The idea is to exploit new ways to reach their consumers and create new audiences (via the use of crowdsourcing). They are finding exciting possibilities that save them both money and time while staying just ahead of the curve of competition. It could be that in this area in particular (advertising & media) the ‘crowd’ is not only following the latest trends but also setting them.

 

9. Utest (utest.com)

Pretty much every type of testing you can imagine, done for you via a crowdsourcing solution.

Testers are chosen from over 50,000 qualified testers in over 180 countries. Testing begins in minutes and you can review details about bugs and progress in realtime via an online dashboard.

The site is well laid out and offers plenty of help and explanation including some useful short videos such as this one (1min 35 seconds) showing how functional testing works.

 

10. Ponoko (ponoko.com)

“Make, sell & buy almost anything.”

Last but not least comes Ponoko.

Wait a minute – did I tell you that I didn’t put these in any particular order? Well I didn’t. This might just be the one I find the most interesting. It’s a make anything platform!

Bringing together makers, designers, suppliers and consumers, it allows shoppers and conceptual product designers to bring their ideas to life, however random they may be. You can take a picture of a rough sketch, upload it, and wait for designers to tell you how much it would cost to have made for real, you don’t have to wait for stock or worry about materials, you can tweak and adjust, do this for yourself… I could go on but probably better for you to take a look at their about page which is one of the best about pages I’ve seen though mainly the 2nd half of it is where it gets interesting.

From their site, Who is using Ponoko? …

The designer – Jeff is a trained designer. He already knows how to get his ideas made and doesn’t want traditional manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers clipping the ticket on the way to market to the tune of at least 50% (and up to 95%). He uses Ponoko to get in front of customers directly – anywhere in the world. And by making, selling and delivering his products through Ponoko, he can concentrate on developing new ideas rather than managing a business.

The maker – Sue is a maker from way back. She makes costume jewelry, badges and other cool stuff. Sometimes though, she finds it hard to get the materials she wants – and she doesn’t have the tools she needs to cut out the intricate designs she would love to make. With Ponoko, she can design delicate pieces made from a whole range of materials – and add the finishing touches herself to create truly individual pieces.

The buyer – Martha wanted a new lamp for her living room, but the ones she saw in the big lighting stores all looked kind of the same – and the cool designer ones were way out of her price range. She bought a light box direct from a designer on Ponoko. It’s got a unique story behind it – she’s pretty sure none of her friends will have one like it – and it cost a fraction of what she would pay in a design store.

I might have to take a closer look at this one.

Weird name though.

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Other Crowdsourcing Sites I Looked At

Agent Anything – brings together two groups of people: Busy, hardworking people who don’t have time to accomplish all their daily tasks or who need an occasional hand (Clients) and College students who want to make some money but need to fit their work around class, practice and more (Agents). At the time of writing this and looking at the site, I didn’t find the site as intuitive as it could be as it’s really missing an ‘About’ link from the home page to tell you what it;s all about before you dive in. They’ve obviously tried to make a super-simple home screen – it’s perfectly safe to click on ‘Post A Mission’ to get into the site and then click on ‘How it works’ in the menu bar which then shows to find out more about the site.

Shorttask.com – I didn’t like it because most of the tasks posted on there just seem to be people trying to find a cheap way to get social media sharing or clicks on their pay per click adverts.

Uinvest – Crowdfunding site, similar to Kickstarter – one of the first crowdfunding sites but has been criticized for projects in the past providing incorrect information and delayed payments

Flickr – Why bother paying ridiculous sums of money for images when there is a perfectly good alternative in Flickr. Assuming you give the appropriate credits, images can be sourced for free or very inexpensively from the millions of high quality images available (the crowd in this case being anyone who has uploaded their image to Flickr) – just use the message service to contact the image owner.

Hubstaff Talent – a free directory for freelancers. Freelancers can create a professional profile that can be used to apply for jobs and receive messages from potential clients. Businesses are able to set up an agency profile where they can search thousands of contractors based on skill, location or category and directly contact the team member they believe would be the best fit – no middleman. Not only can Hubstaff Talent be used to help freelancers find work but it can also be used to assist businesses in finding freelancers by searching the profiles held on the platform.

Namethis – is a way of creating a 48-hour contest to find a brand name for your venture. NameThis has named over 700 new things over the last 14 months, but they are currently offline re-organising the site which they promise to re-launch soon. The way it did work is that the namethis community would suggest names, vote on the best ones and then fees paid to the best three ideas.

Kluster – I kept on seeing articles referring to a crowdsourcing site called ‘Kluster’ but it looks like they don’t exist anymore. Their tagline was “Everyone deserves a voice. The question is—how loud?” … obviously not loud enough.

Redesignme – I find this one a little confusing. The website is clean and looks good, they have experience and look credible but I find it a little generic and not too different to what you get out of the box with lots of social media platforms these days. So maybe their advantage is their experience particularly in crowdsourcing, or maybe there is more to this solution that at first glance. Their website states: At Redesignme, we have experience with building and guiding over 100 successful online community platforms for all kinds of different purposes. We love to share that experience with you. And if you are looking for the right technology then we can also supply you with state of the art community software. hmmm. Plus all the little faces in the picture on their home page (except 1) are sad faces – what’s that about?

Zooppa – “People Powered Brand Energy” – submit your own brand sponsored video contests and graphic design contests for cash rewards (similar concept to 99Designs)

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OK peepsicles, I’ve had about enough of crrowdsourcing for now. I’m all crowdsourced out. One more final thought, then I’m done. I hope you found this useful…

Final Thought

As I said in the previous crowdsourcing article, Crowdsourcing is huge and most big companies these days have incorporated it into their process in one form or another – at the very least in gathering customer feedback.

If you’re in business, then you should as a bare minimum give some serious thought to how you can use crowdsourcing to involve your customer more, build a stronger relationship and create a better customer experience – because that’s what successful modern businesses are doing. Product (and Service) development is no longer an ‘over the wall’ endeavour but should involve the customer as much as possible.

… and maybe you can use crowdsouring in other areas too.

That being said, having looked here at a lot of different companies of different shapes and sizes, I’d say that for most companies – particularly for smaller companies, there’s still a long way to go to understand and get the most out of this concept (just look at the companies I found in my research that have come & gone or are ‘closed for maintenance’).

Very feasible these days but perhaps not as easy as it first seems to prevent mis-use of the platforms and solutions whilst providing a high quality yet economical solution.

What do you think?