C ROWD SOURCING F ARHEEN M OSHARRAF

W HAT IS C ROWD SOURCING ? Crowd sourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. e.g. Apple - many people will have limited interaction with the company. Much of the product information and support required is found in forums where people share their knowledge. For example, Googling “iPhone 3GS frozen” returns a multitude of answers (including YouTube videos), only one of which is from the official Apple support site.

Users--also known as the crowd--typically form into online communities based on the Web site, and the crowd submits solutions to the site or produce its contents. The crowd can also sort through the solutions, finding the best ones. E.g Amazon. Every product has a review available. You can rate the review by answering the question ‘was this review helpful to you?’ W HAT IS C ROWD SOURCING ?

B ENEFITS OF C ROWDSOURCING Fairly lower price, compared to the price for hiring a dedicated professional. high number of people who are ready to work for you anytime. The crowd sourcing project can be used to create awareness about your ecommerce site as well as your products and brand name. for example, if there have been several complaints about one of your products, you can ask crowd members to suggest improvements. By researching your crowd members and learning about their strengths, you gain access to a pool of competent professionals that can help your ecommerce business with its future needs. Having such access again reduces your business costs and overhead.

P ROBLEMS WITH C ROWDSOURCING Quality-cheap labor results less credible product. Questionable ownership- crowdsourcing members do contest with and sue businesses that use their ideas or products. Choosing what to crowdsource & what to keep in-house.

T YPE OF C ROWDSOURCING Crowd funding: Projects are funded by a large group of people, like most charity events. Kickstarter is a great example, which millions of dollars are funded into all kinds of projects from movies to gadgets – with all the funds coming from people interested in supporting the project. Crowd wisdom: Where users ask questions in front of a large pool of people willing to answer, like Yahoo Answers. A more serious form of crowd wisdom can be found at InnoCentive, which is a community where large corporations post technical or scientific problems to people who can help to solve the questions.

T YPE OF C ROWDSOURCING Crowd voting: It occurs when a website gathers a large group's opinions and judgment on a certain topic. Threadless.com selects the T-shirts it sells by having users provide designs and vote on the ones they like, which are then printed and available for purchase.

S OME A PPLICATIONS OF C ROWDSOURCING Testing & Refining a Product Netflix: Netflix launched a subtitling community project on the video captioning service Amara, formerly known as Universal Subtitles. The company was looking for a limited number of volunteers on the site, and apparently wanted to try using crowd-sourced captioning with a “popular 80s cartoon and other classic TV programming,” Market Research. Knowledge Management Wikipedia: perhaps the pioneers of crowd sourcing. The not- for-profit. Wikipedia Foundation launched its free, web- based, multilingual and collaborative encyclopedia in It has over 17m articles written collaboratively by the community and is the most popular reference site on the internet.

S OME A PPLICATIONS OF C ROWDSOURCING Customer Service My Starbucks ideas: My Starbucks Idea is a Starbucks online customer community where Starbucks invites its customers to contribute their views and ideas about the company, whether they be revolutionary or simple.

E LEMENTS FOR A W ISE C ROWD Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts. Independence: People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them. Decentralization: People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge. Aggregation: Summing up all the diversified inputs and producing a single output.