Crowdsourcing is being tipped as one of the big things to watch out for in the coming years. In essence, Crowdsourcing websites harness the power of their community to achieve common goals quicker & more effectively.
We’ve hand picked some of our favourite Crowdsourcing websites that you might just have a need for:
99 Designs – Logo Design
Need a new logo for your latest web venture or business idea? Instead of hiring just one designer why not harness the power of crowdsourced logo design.
99designs allows users to set up competitions for the community, you set a price that you’re willing to pay the winner & write a brief on what you’d like to see in your logo. The community then starts submitting logos which you can eliminate, until you eventually pick a winner.
Covestor – Investing
Investing can be time consuming process, especially for people that already have full time jobs in other industries.
Covestor is crowd sourced investing, you can follow seasoned investors & watch their every move, copy their trades & hopefully (if you’ve done your homework) profit. The investors that you follow then get reimbursed just like a typical stock market professional.
Crowd Spring – Web/Graphic Design
Similar to 99 Designs Crowd Spring allows you to crowd source logos, print design & web design from the community.
The average project on Crowd Spring gets around 68 entries & you’ll get your money back if you get less than 25.
Cure Together – Health Research
Cure together is being dubbed as Open Source Health Research & the concept it simple. Use it to compare people that have similar medical symptoms or conditions to you & use the information to find treatments that will help.
Get Satisfaction – Customer Service/Feedback
Easily Crowdsource the customer service & feedback for your website or web application. Get Satisfaction enables your users to submit feedback, ideas & get help from registered staff members in an open forum.
Not only does the site act as a customer service portal but it can also help solve other users problems without them having to get in touch with customer service in the first place.
Half Bakery – Inventions
Half Bakery allows users to submit ideas for weird & wacky inventions. The community then gives feedback on the idea or perhaps comes up with suggestions for improvements.
iStockPhoto – Stock Photography & Icons
Finding photos for use in a project can often be a time consuming process, especially when you have no idea whether or not you can use the image (due to licensing restrictions).
iStockPhoto removes the barriers between designers & consumers to provide a fully searchable database of millions of stock photos, icons & other images. All are royalty free so you can use them in your projects without attribution.
Trip Advisor – Travel Advice
Word of mouth is perhaps one of the best ways to find all those hidden gems when you’re traveling abroad. But what about word of mouth from hundreds of people around the world?
Trip Advisor brings the world together to talk about locations & specific places. Allowing them to rate accommodation, hotels, attractions & tours. Enabling you to plan the perfect holiday.
User Testing – Usability Testing
Some companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay users to participate in usability tests of their website. This involves organising, logistics & planning to execute correctly. User Testing takes out the middle man & reduces costs by Crowdsourcing the usability testing online & allowing users to submit feedback remotely for only $19.
Traditional user testing costs $250
$100 Pay a recruiting agency to screen for your target audience ($100 per user).
+ $75 Pay a user to come to your office for an hour.
+ $75 Pay a facilitator (a usability expert or an employee) to ask questions and observe a user testing your site for an hour.
= $250 to watch one person use your website.
Yahoo Answers – Answers to Questions
Ever wanted to have a question answered by 10-20 people at once? Yahoo answers allows you to ask anything you like & the community gets rewarded for providing the best answers possible.
Threadless – T-Shirts
Threadless facilitates the Crowdsourcing of t-shirts designs & allows the community to vote the best. The winners then get a cash prize & the design goes to print. Designers can earn up to $2,500 per design that gets printed & $500 per reprint.
Crowdsourcing the design allows Threadless to sell the t-shirts at much cheaper prices than normal (sometimes as little as $5 per t-shirt).
Own Gig – Live Concerts/Gigs
Ever wanted to put on a private gig with your favourite artist but didn’t have enough people to put up the cash? Own Gig puts you in touch with other people that would enjoy seeing the same artist then helps facilitate a private gig provided there’s enough interest.
LeadVine – Lead Generation
Leadvine helps businesses Crowdsource their lead generation & referrals. This could be anything from sales leads to paying a referral fee for help to get into an exclusive club or even a referral fee to help with finding new employees.
Name This – Name Generation
Ever had a great idea but just can’t think of a suitable name? Name This crowdsources names for products, projects or websites. The service costs $99 & distrubuted the fee between the top 3 winners for each project posted.
