Vitamin Water Crowdsourcing Project

Vitamin Water’s latest flavor, launched in March this year, is another great example of how crowdsourcing can be used to get valuable input from the public. The new flavor was developed and named by the brand’s Facebook fans and it is called “Connect”.

There were several stages of the project and each focused on developing a certain aspect of the product.

Over the summer the fans were able to discuss about different flavors. The more chatter about a flavor online, the higher it was rated on the Facebook page. The ten most talked about flavors were put on a list that users voted on. This is a good example of using a community to sort and rank ideas in a co-creation process. Fans couldn’t create their own flavors from scratch, but they could influence the top 10 flavors and then vote for the best.

When the flavor was selected, in October 2009, the fans were able to design the packaging by using a Facebook application, and then, they could also choose a name for the product. The person or team who would create the winning name would be given a prize of $5,000. The prize was won by Sarah, a Facebook fan from Illinois.

This is a great example of co-creation and working with customers and fans to develop a product. The new Vitamin Water drink is out on the market now. This flavor is the result of a project more than one million people participated in. That’s a lot of people who will undoubtedly be interested in buying the product.

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Vormator Reveals a Key Element for Successful Crowdsourcing Projects

Vormator is another very interesting crowdsourcing webdesign project. The Vormator contest challenges artists to create a visual by using a very limited palette of shapes and possibilities. Artists are provided with 8 vector shapes, called the Elements, which they are allowed to use within a given set of rules. The goal of the project is to show the importance of limitations on creativity. The results of the contest prove that even with a large number of limitations, a surprising variation of outstanding graphics is possible.

Since the start of the Vormator project, the challenge has been successful on the Internet and is widely discussed on design portals, blogs and design forums. Also, a number of design professors are using the concept as a teaching method.

Over 500 submissions from all over the world were submitted to the contest. The best results were selected and have already appeared in print. It is intriguing to see the variety of artwork that came out starting from just 8 basic elements.

The Vormator contest points out a key element for a crowdsourcing project to be successful: give crowds the right boundaries. The amount of creativity you can expect from a crowd is very much dependent on finding the right balance between abstraction and concreteness. An open call for ideas will simply be too open. The creativity of ideas will not be deep enough. So, it is important to carefully define the questions to the public and add boundaries in order for the quality of ideas to increase.

And because I know you all love pictures, I selected a few Vormator pictures from deviantart:

The Netflix Challenge –A $1 Million Worth Crowdsourcing Project

A FORMIDABLE CHALLENGE

October 2006 Netflix launched a formidable challenge: whoever would come up with a software that was 10% better than Cinematch, the Netflix software for predicting the movies customers would like, would earn a $1 million prize!

Tens of thousands of people from all over the world started working on this task right away and each day teams submitted their updated solutions to the Netflix Prize Web page. Netflix instantly calculated how much better than Cinematch they were. Even if there were so many people working on the challenge, it took almost three years before a team came up with results that surpassed the 10% barriers. The winner was BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, a seven-person team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE RESULTS

The Netflix contest was largely followed not just because of the $1 million prize, but because of its lessons which could extend well beyond improving movie recommendations. The data base made available by Netflix for this competition –over 100 million ratings that more than 480,000 users gave to nearly 18,000 movies- was one of the largest real-life data sets available for research. The outcome of this project is most valuable, as a large-scale predictive model can be applied across the fields of science, commerce and politics.

APPLICATIONS: CROWDSOURCING -A MODEL WITH GREAT POTENTIAL

The Netflix contest is another project that proves how effective crowdsourcing can be. Before launching this challenge that was open to everyone out there in the crowd, Netflix’s founders had tried for years to improve their software, with only incremental results. So, in this case, the most efficient way of solving the task was neither hiring a highly qualified professional to do the job, nor outsourcing the task (employ a third party to solve the task), but crowdsourcing it.

The progression of the results that were achieved and the way teams came together, especially in the last part of the contest, suggest that this kind of Internet-enabled approach, known as crowdsourcing, can be applied to complex business and scientific challenges.

The blending of different statistical and machine-learning techniques “only works well if you combine models that approach the problem differently,” said Chris Volinsky, a scientist at AT&T Research and a leader of the Bellkor team. “That’s why collaboration has been so effective, because different people approach problems differently.”

Another detail that is very relevant to the power of crowdsourcing is that among the top teams there were not only academic researchers, but also laymen with no prior exposure to collaborative filtering, who were virtually learning the problem space from scratch.

CROWDSOURCING BENEFITS

So, we can see that the benefits of crowdsourcing that I enlisted in my previous post apply in this case too. I said there that one benefit of crowdsourcing for the organization is that it can tap a wide range of talent that might not be present in its own organization. And, on the consumer’s side, the benefit is that crowdsourcing opens the door for virtual unknowns in their fields to gain large-scale recognition for their talents. And that is exactly what happened in this case too.

Another benefit of crowdsourcing that I enlisted was that many crowdsourcing projects offer the participants the chance to win or earn money. And $1 million is a very attractive prize! And, at the same time, crowdsourcing offers organizations the benefit of having problems explored at comparatively little cost. One million dollars might sound like an awfully big prize for such a small improvement. But in fact, as I mentioned earlier, Netflix’s founders had tried to improve their software for years, with only insignificant results, and they knew that a 10% bump would be a challenge for even the most deft programmer. They also knew that getting to 10 percent would certainly be worth well in excess of $1 million to the company. And then, if you think of all the people that entered the competition and spent time on trying to solve the problem, the cost comes down to somewhere around $20 per person.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the Netflix challenge is another very good example of the great potential crowdsourcing has. The Netflix prize seems to have been particularly well-designed to encourage collaboration and sharing, which may be the key to effective crowdsourcing.

HOW TO EARN MONEY WITH CROWDSOURCING POWER

If you are interested in finding more about a crowdsourcing project you can earn money with go to crowdsourcingpower.com

Ruth Taylor

Crowdsourcing Benefits

Crowdsourcing refers to tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, being outsourced to a group of people or community –a crowd- through an open call. The high level of interactivity and collaboration between organizations and consumers which is inherent to crowdsourcing results in a mutually beneficial relationship.

Benefits of Crowdsourcing for Organizations

• Problems can be explored at comparatively little cost, and often very quickly.
• Payment is by results or even omitted.
• The organization can tap a wide range of talent than might not be present in its own organization.
• By listening to the crowd, organizations gain first-hand insight on their customers’ desires.

Benefits of Crowdsourcing for Consumers

• For consumers, crowdsourcing presents an opportunity for personal fulfillment.
• The community may feel a brand-building kinship with the crowdsourcing organization, which is the result of an earned sense of ownership through contribution and collaboration.
• Crowdsourcing opens the door for virtual unknowns in their fields to gain large-scale recognition for their talents.
• Many crowdsourcing projects also offer the participants the chance to win or earn money.

CrowdsourcingPower has a project through which anyone can earn a supplemental income. Visit crowdsourcingpower.com for more details. Don’t miss the crowdsourcing benefits!

Why Our Chances Are Much Better Than Mine and Yours and His

One of the objections people come up with against the CrowdsourcingPower business is that the chances that you find a car that is wanted is very little. And that is correct. But you are not working alone. You are with CrowdsourcingPower. And when there is a group working together to find a car, then their chances increase more than you might think they would.

What are the chances that a person writing down license plates will find a car which is wanted? If it’s just one person and if we think of how many cars there are in the US, then the chances are extremely slight. But how much do the chances increase if there is a group working on gathering license plates? How large does the group have to be for their chances to become significant?

In order to answer these questions I would give an example from Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody”. If you were standing in a line with 35 other people and the guy in front of you would challenge you to bet $50 that no two people in line share a birthday, would you take the challenge? If you’re like most people, you wouldn’t. With 36 people and 365 possible birthdays, it seems like there would only be about a 1/10 chance of a match, which would leave you a 90% chance of losing $50.

In fact you should take the bet, since you would have better than an 80% chance of winning $50! It might seem hard to believe but this is true. It’s called the Birthday Paradox (though it’s not really a paradox, but it’s called like that because it comes as a surprise and most people find it hard to believe it at a first sight).

When calculating the chance of winning this bet most people go wrong because they think about matching their own birthday. If you go like that, chances are small indeed. But in a group, other people’s relationship to you isn’t all that matters. Instead of counting people, you need to count links between people. So, you don’t just compare your birthday to 35 other birthdays, but compare each of the other 35 birthdays to the rest of the group. If you go this way, you will get more than 600 pairs of birthdays.

With 4 people, there are 6 comparisons you can make.

With 10 people in a group, the number of comparisons you can make rises to 45!

The chance of you and a person in the group sharing the birthday is small. But the chance of any two people’s birthdays matching rises much faster than the number of people themselves. This is the engine of the Birthday Paradox.

This shows that:

• Groups of people are complex and have great potential.
• The larger the group, the larger the chances to win.
• The chances a group has are higher than you might think at a first sight.

CrowdsourcingPower gives you the opportunity to work with a large powerful group and earn money. Chances are all yours!

Successful Crowdsourcing Projects: Galaxy Zoo

Galaxy Zoo is an online astronomy project which invites people to assist in classifying over a million galaxies. The original project was launched in July 2007 and since there were so many galaxies to be classified, the team thought it might take at least two years for visitors to the site to work through all of them.

Within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour!

After one month 80,000 volunteers had already classified more than 10 million images of galaxies meeting the goals for the first phase of the project.

In the first year more than 150,000 from around the world have logged on to the Galaxy Zoo website to take part in the project run from Oxford University’s physics department to study images of galaxies taken for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a robot telescope based in New Mexico that is producing a digital map of the universe.

The volunteers had a tutorial available on the site and had to take a test before they could sign up. The two categories in which they had to classify the galaxies were spirals, which are circular pinwheels, like our Milky Way galaxy, and elliptical galaxies, which are rugby ball like shaped. Because of their complex shape, computer programs have been unable to classify the galaxies, but the human eye proved to be much better at this task.

For verification purposes, the same image was shown to several users and scientists have been struck by how good the amateurs are at classifying these images. “We’ve proved that random people are as good as professional astronomers”, Dr Chris Lintott, a member of the Oxford team, said. (source: The Telegraph)

Galaxy Zoo is a collaboration between researchers at many institutions, including Oxford University, Portsmouth University, Nottingham University, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, University of California, Berkeley and Fingerprint Digital Media, Belfast.

This project is another example of how crowdsourcing delivers productivity that would otherwise not be possible. And another thing that is worth pointing out is the accuracy of the information provided by amateurs, who proved out to be as good as the experts in the field at classifying the images.

Other examples of successful crowdsourcing projects would be those run by Google, Amazon, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, LEGO, Pepsi, Canada’s Cambrian House, Eli Lilly (Innocentive), Kraft, General Mills, Nike, MasterCard, iStockphoto, Zebo and many more.

CrowdsourcingPower is a new business based on the crowdsourcing model. Anyone who needs an extra income can earn it working on a database with CrowdsourcingPower. Fore more information visit CrowdsourcingPower.com

Reference:

http://www.galaxyzoo.org/story

Wikipedia -A Successful Crowdsourcing Project

Anybody who has ever searched anything on the Internet knows about Wikipedia. It is a huge online encyclopedia that has information on pretty much anything you can think of. Despite all controversy, according to Alexa and other sources Wikipedia is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet.

Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com and it grew to approximately 20,000 articles and 18 language editions by the end of 2001. In August 2009 the English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles.

All this information is not only used by a huge crowd of people, but has also been created by the crowd. Wikipedia is a project based on the crowdsourcing model, in which tasks traditionally performed by employees are turned to the Internet multitude, or the crowd.

Wikipedia’s 14 million articles (3.1 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. If you read an article and notice something wrong or if you have more information on the subject, you can hop on and edit the article or provide more in-depth explanations. This way the information is continuously verified and enriched by different people who share the same interest. But, on the other side, because of this feature the articles are also exposed to vandalism.

An early study conducted by IBM researchers in 2003 concluded that vandalism on Wikipedia is usually repaired extremely quickly, so most users will never see its effects. Another study published by Nature in 2005 showed that for scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy in Encyclopaedia Britannica and had a similar rate of serious errors.

This shows the great potential and power of the crowd. With the tools that we have available now, in the Internet Age, with groups being able to come together and communicate easier than ever before, it is amazing to see big projects being so easily accomplished.

Crowdsourcing is a model that works great! It’s been proven by so many successful projects. I am sure that more and more business people will apply this concept to various projects and to create successful businesses.

Google, Amazon, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, LEGO, Pepsi, Canada’s Cambrian House, Eli Lilly (Innocentive), Kraft, General Mills, Nike, MasterCard, iStockphoto, Zebo are just a few of the companies that have had successful crowdsourcing projects. CrowdsourcingPower is a new company that gives any individual the opportunity to earn money through a crowdsourcing project.

I would end with a question raised by Don Tapscott[1] -“After all, if you can make an encyclopedia (Wikipedia) via social networking and mass collaboration, what else could you do?” or, I would say “…what else could you not do?”

Ruth Taylor

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[1] Don Tapscott is Chief Executive of the think tank New Paradigm and the author of 11 books, most recently, with Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. The quotation is taken from the foreword to We Are Smarter than Me by Barry Libert & Jon Spector, 2008, Wharton School Publishing.

Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com and it grew to approximately 20,000 articles and 18 language editions by the end of 2001. In August 2009 the English Wikipedia reached 3 million articles.

All this information is not only used by a huge crowd of people, but has also been created by the crowd. Wikipedia is a project based on the crowdsourcing model, in which tasks traditionally performed by employees are turned to the Internet multitude, or the crowd.

Wikipedia’s 14 million articles (3.1 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. If you read an article and notice something wrong or if you have more information on the subject, you can hop on and edit the article or provide more in-depth explanations. This way the information is continuously verified and enriched by different people who share the same interest. But, on the other side, because of this feature the articles are also exposed to vandalism.

An early study conducted by IBM researchers in 2003 concluded that vandalism on Wikipedia is usually repaired extremely quickly, so most users will never see its effects. Another study published by Nature in 2005 showed that for scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy in Encyclopaedia Britannica and had a similar rate of serious errors.

This shows the great potential and power of the crowd. With the tools that we have available now, in the Internet Age, with groups being able to come together and communicate easier than ever before, it is amazing to see big projects being so easily accomplished.

Crowdsourcing is a model that works great! It’s been proven by so many successful projects. I am sure that more and more business people will apply this concept to various projects and to create successful businesses.

Google, Amazon, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, LEGO, Pepsi, Canada’s Cambrian House, Eli Lilly (Innocentive), Kraft, General Mills, Nike, MasterCard, iStockphoto, Zebo are just a few of the companies that have had successful crowdsourcing projects. CrowdsourcingPower is a new company that gives any individual the opportunity to earn money through a crowdsourcing project.

I would end with a question raised by Don Tapscott[1] -“After all, if you can make an encyclopedia (Wikipedia) via social networking and mass collaboration, what else could you do?” or, I would say “…what else could you not do?”

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[1] Don Tapscott is Chief Executive of the think tank New Paradigm and the author of 11 books, most recently, with Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. The quotation is taken from the foreword to We Are Smarter than Me by Barry Libert & Jon Spector, 2008, Wharton School Publishing.

Crowdsourcing Saves Lives in Haiti

The earthquake in Haiti devastated people’s life and also left them without any emergency service to call on for help. But in less than five days, a makeshift version of 911 sprung to life, due to a few tech-savvy social entrepreneurs, receptive ears in the U.S. government and hundreds of Haitian Creole-speaking strangers crowdsourced from around the world.

The idea of setting up an emergency service started from Josh Nesbit, who heads a non-profit delivering health care in Sub-Saharan Africa through mobile phones. He sent out a tweet asking for help and it all went from there. Yes, it all started with a simple tweet!

Here is how this system works:

• People in Haiti text 4636
• The SMS enters the database
• Volunteers translate the message from Creole into English
• Volunteers find GPS coordinates that people on the ground can use
• Messages are classified and prioritized
• Messages are passed off to organizations that can do something about the issue.

So, if a Haitian texts 4636, a stranger on the other side of the world will translate it and other volunteers will send it to the right responder, whether it’s an urgent medical need or a general request for more food and water.

In some cases, this project has been life-saving. For example, a Haitian woman went into labor and started bleeding out. She texted 4636 calling for help. Volunteers pinpointed her location on a map, giving the US Coast Guard her coordinates. They were able to reach her in time and help her deliver the baby.

A Haitian clinic texted 4636 that it was running low on fuel for its generator. Within 20 minutes they got an answer from the Red Cross.

As you can see, most of the stages in this project to help people in Haiti are completed by volunteers who are spread all across the world –from America to Europe and Africa. (See the live map here ) What they all have in common is a database and a shared passion and commitment. And the system works great!

It is great to see so many people working together in such a big project and doing a great job! As Nesbit said, “I hope it doesn’t take another catastrophe to see this type of collaboration again.”

This is an example of how powerful the crowd can be and the great things that can be accomplished when people from various places and backgrounds work together towards the same purpose.

Crowdsourcing International is a project based on the same principles –people from various places in the US and Canada work together to build a database that will be very useful to help find missing children, relocate stolen cars or help find missing persons. It is already working great, and by looking at the success of other crowdsourcing projects, we can tell that it will be a very successful project too.

ESP Game or Google Image Labeler -Great Ideas Based on Crowdsourcing

The ESP Game was launched in 2004 and it gets people to label images as a side-effect of playing a game. The image labels can be used to improve image search on the Web. The game was created by Luis von Ahn from Carnegie Mellon University. Google bought a license to create its own version of the game in 2006. The Google version is known as Google Image Labeler.

In the ESP game two partners who don’t know each other are paired up and asked to agree on a word that would be an appropriate label for an image that they both see. The two partners cannot communicate. They both enter possible words, and once a word is entered by both partners (not necessarily at the same time), that word is agreed upon and becomes a label for the image. The game encourages the players to assign “obvious” labels, for the two partners to come to an agreement in the shortest possible time.

Having two people play together makes the game more fun and the information obtained accurate. Since the only thing the two partners have in common is that they both see the same image, they must enter reasonable labels to have any chance of agreeing on one.

The game goes on for two and a half minutes, and during this time the players have to label 15 images. There are also prizes given out weekly, such as $20 to $50 gifts, and everybody who gets more than 50,000 points a week can win a prize.

Even if the game is designed in such a way that people have fun, its main purpose is for Google to ensure that its keywords are matched to correct images. Each matched word helps Google build an accurate database used for Google Image Search in order to return better search results.

Image recognition is a task that computers cannot currently complete. Humans are perfectly capable of it, but not necessarily willing. The game made this task look fun, so now, there are people who play the game over 40 hours a week! It’s like they were hired full time to label images! But instead of it being a tedious boring job, they are just playing a game, while also “helping the world become a better place”. (quote from the esp game site: http://www.espgame.org/gwap/about/)

This is a great example of a successful crowdsourcing project that shows how a community or a crowd of people can bring their efforts together to accomplish a huge task and create something useful and of great value.

Crowdsourcing -Changing the Way Business Is Done

There is such great power and potential in the crowds! In his book “Crowdsourcing -Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business“, Jeff Howe explains both socially and mathematically how a crowd of amateurs can be more accurate than an individual expert. The power and wisdom of the crowds can be a real gold mine.

If historically crowds depended on proximity, on bringing people physically together, the internet makes it possible for virtual crowds to be easily formed. So, suddenly, people have the necessary tools available to organize and use the great potential of the crowd to solve complex projects.

Crowdsourcing and the Internet are not only changing the way people interact, but also the way business is done. Instead of us being just customers or audience, it is now possible for everybody to be a potential partner, to participate in the process by which those products are created. And with technology becoming so good and so easy to use, it has become easier for people to be very good.

In the video below Jeff Howe briefly presents some very interesting ideas about crowdsourcing and its applications.