The Top Five Crowdsourcing Mega-trends

I had my eyes opened to the massive growth of the crowdsourcing industry at a SXSW panel earlier this year. Ever since then, I have been looking for an opportunity to bring more information on this trend to {grow}. I’m fortunate today to have an expert on the subject, David Bratvold, provide a guest post: If you’re not yet familiar with crowdsourcing, it’s a new work process that involves getting a crowd of people to help with a task typically performed by one employee or contractor. Imagine needing a new logo for your business. Rather than hire a freelancer, agency, or in-house designer, with crowdsourcing you can post your need and several designers will compete and create a custom logo just for you. While this is a common example, today crowdsourcing extends far beyond simple graphic design and can be broken down into four main subcategories: Microtasks – Taking a project and breaking it into tiny bits as seen on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (“the online marketplace for work.”). All posts

A Closer Look At Crowdsourcing Whether you like it or not, you are either crowdsourcing or being sourced. The information we are generating in a big data world is starting to funnel into tightly curated areas of interest to companies and people. And it’s only going to get bigger! Crowdsourcing can refer to a number of things, including gathering resources or opinions from large groups of people, and today, refers to a revolutionary type of fundraising. Recent successes in crowdsourcing ranges from the launch of new products, such as the Turtle Shell speaker, to the funding of new movies like Veronica Mars, both getting headlines for disrupting the traditional process for launching a new project. Here is the what, who, when, how and why of crowdsourcing: What: Basically, crowdsourcing is a new way to collect a community and financing that you can use to bring any project you could imagine to fruition. When: For starters, be realistic when you set your goals. How: You need to know just how crowdsourcing actually works.

big data and crowsourcing infographic