Crowdsourcing and Big Data
blog Cloud Labor, Distributed Knowledge, Open InnovationWhat are the types of crowdsourcing ventures and which ones are the most suitable for addressing Big Data challenges?
Web's Largest listing of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding events
Web's Largest Directory of Sites2,358 crowdsourcing and crowdfunding sites
What are the types of crowdsourcing ventures and which ones are the most suitable for addressing Big Data challenges?
Sanofi is continuing to innovate even the challenge process by conducting a preliminary crowdsourcing the question "What matters most?" about diabetes leading up to their 2012 challenge...
Crowd funding is a practice that allows entrepreneurs to reach out, typically online, to Average Joe-investors who put up small amounts of money in exchange for some product or perk. Many...
The end goal for ethical and social investment alike must surely be that we make it as easy as possible for individuals and institutions to invest their money in viable and sustainable social...
The crowdsourcing and crowdfunding industry is picking up momentum at an exceptional rate. Validity of the models involved is now grounded in the ever-increasing size of the participatory crowd, the scale of the capital networks involved, and the unique value delivered to customers, communities, and investors alike. Astute expansion-stage venture firms are now decisively backing and further fuelling explosive high-growth in crowd-driven companies. With more than $280 million invested in 35 different crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms during 2011 — an average investment of $8 million per funding round — it is clear that the industry’s probationary period is over.
Open innovation is rapidly changing the way organizations tackle tough problems. Even the United States government loves open innovation, using its Challenge.gov platform to monitor pollution, improve employment opportunities for people with disabilities, and crowdsource a “next-generation” combat vehicle, among other initiatives.
ChallengePost, which runs Challenge.gov for the federal government in addition to software competitions for private companies, firmly believes that competition breeds innovation. We spoke with Brian Koles, business development manager at ChallengePost, who explained the myriad benefits of open innovation.
With the well-established institutional frameworks of South-Africa and Cape Town, the city is an ideal piloting area for such new mechanisms by providing stable and proven legal institutions,...
There are a myriad of possibilities in the search for crowdsourcing milestones that announced its advent and its adoption as a model for online production, problem solving and for organizing for collective action: Commercial applications, advertising campaigns that succeed or backfire, funding for entrepreneurial ventures. This list of one dozen focuses on the pinnacles that demonstrate crowdsourcing’s highest potential: For public good, scientific research and technological innovation.
Each of these events involves a seminal moment when crowdsourcing came into greater public awareness being driven from calls to action that resulted in ever increasing numbers of individuals working together in a manner that has raised our collective consciousness.
We have selected our landmark crowdsourcing events based on criteria that make them notable because of their scale, their impact and the extent of their outreach to a wider audience both demographically and geographically. See if you agree with our choices!
I am not a writer. I am not a journalist. I am a software developer and I built LocalByUs. I may not be a writer, but writing software is a lot like writing a book: you write it, refine it, and publish it. You don’t know if anyone will buy it, read it or like it. It’s not easy.
Writing LocalByUs was challenging. At times during the last six months, I coded away like a madwoman, making quick progress on the site. At other times, I stared at the screen, blocked, stumped by impossible-to-solve issues — that, of course, seem simple in retrospect. Tough as it was, it was also fun. Working through all the problems, I have learned more in the last six months than I did in the last six years. But when I started, I did not know that building LocalByUs would be a worthwhile venture. So why build it?
I like my local newspaper. It hasn’t gone out of business… yet. Experts think the days of local newspapers are numbered. People search the web for the information they used to get from their local newspaper. Some newspapers have morphed into online local newspapers. AOL’s Patch is trying an online newspaper model at a big scale. By all reports, it is failing as well. But most of what the local newspaper reports — school sports, business news, police blotter, neighborhood association news, local politics and so on — could very well be crowdsourced.
Late last month, GoodWorldCreations LLC officially launched HelpersUnite, a crowdfunding platform that links creative and commercial ventures with charitable causes and events. In stark contrast to popular crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, which do not allow charitable giving, HelpersUnite requires project creators to donate at least five percent (5%) of funds raised to a cause of their choice. Crowdsourcing.org spoke with Luan Cox, co-founder and CEO of HelpersUnite, to learn more about her fresh, charitably inclined take on crowdfunding.
Obtaining the right source of finance at the right price is one of the biggest challenges faced by entrepreneurs. Currently, a wide variety of funding options are available to expand or start their business initiative. One out-of-the-box funding solution that has emerged in the recent years is the phenomenon of ‘crowdfunding’.
For centuries, family and friends have been one of the most common sources of early-stage seed capital. Crowdfunding is the natural extension of this model, enabling fundraisers to connect through social networks with a larger, online network of friends, colleagues and other people that are simply just into their idea and want to help them.
Courtesy of social media and crowdfunding websites, everyone from start-up entrepreneurs to the champions of social causes are now able to build interconnected networks more easily and more effectively than ever before. By leveraging their own personal networks to spread the word about the project to potential contributors through word of mouth, email, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, they can tap into existing communities of potential contributors, to launch and promote their campaigns.
As crowdfunding becomes an ever more popular method for raising funds online, new sites continue to emerge that appeal to localities previously unexposed to the transformative fundraising model. One such site is Fondomat, the first crowdfunding enterprise in the Czech Republic. It’s also the “cheapest crowdfunding website to use for both creative projects and charity-based fundraising in the world,” boasts Fondomat co-founder Conrad Watts. Crowdsourcing.org spoke with Watts to get the inside scoop on his new crowdfunding venture.
An interview with Markus Lampinen talking about the origins of GrowVC and how he is contributing to developing what they refer to as an ‘ecosystem for startups’.
To compete in the Ocean Health X Prize, winners must be able to build and demonstrate the most accurate and reliable deep ocean pH sensors to help measure the global effects of climate change on...
Founder and CEO Wil Schroter is hoping to sculpt this new company into a way for companies to fund projects that don’t quite fit into the conventional avenues. He created an incubator, Virtucon...
But as the crowdfunding platform continues to grow, seemingly unstoppably, it might be challenging its inherent worth. A lot of this is pure math: the more projects there are the more money is...
We recently had a chance to get on the phone with OurCrowd CEO Jon Medved, who was kind enough to answer a few questions about his company, entrepreneurship, and equity crowdfunding.
One region which hasn't seen crowdfunding take off in a big way is Middle East and North Africa. We profile Shekra, an Egyptian crowdfunding platform that hopes its Shariah-compliant model can appeal to investors.
The teams in the MJFF competition were challenged to develop a model that could use the data to identify the Parkinson’s patients from the control group and identify what stage of the disease...
In 2000, a college student named Jake Nickell entered a t-shirt design contest hosted by Dreamless.org, a (now defunct) online forum for web programmers and graphic designers. The winning design would become the official t-shirt of a Dreamless event in London. Out of about 100 entries, Nickell’s design won the contest.
Jacob DeHart, another college student with a passion for design, also entered the competition. Though his design didn’t win, he and Nickell (who had met through the forum) began to talk about how much fun it was to participate in the contest. “Dreamless was all about art and design and a lot of artists on there had 'battles' and shared/critiqued their work with each other,” wrote Nickell in a blog post entitled ‘ Threadless.com: The History’. “It was all around a very creative environment for hobbyists and professionals alike to unleash some creativity in their free time.” That got the two thinking: what if they held an ongoing design contest where the winning t-shirts would go on sale? Soon, Threadless was born.
Founded in 2010, the industry website, Crowdsourcing.org, is a neutral organization dedicated solely to crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. As one of the most influential and credible authorities in the crowdsourcing space, Crowdsourcing.org is recognized worldwide for its intellectual capital, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding practice expertise and unbiased thought leadership.
