Tag: crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing the security world

Crowdsourcing security testing is proving to be a winning business

Following the success of their Hack the Pentagon project, the US Department of Defense is to extend the project across its network.

Run over four weeks earlier this year, the pilot program reportedly generated t138 unique bug reports and paid out $71,200 to hackers.

The company running the pilot, Hacker One, is one of a group of companies organising bounty hunts for the hacking community.

Casey Ellis, the CEO of competing service Bugcrowd, describes his business as being “essential a community of thirty thousand hackers from around the world.”

“The whole idea is to identify where the vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed before the bad guys,” he says. “your guys who you are paying by the hour are plenty smart but they are competing with a crowd of bad guys who think creatively.”

Ellis explained how services like Bugcrowd allow clients like the US Department of Defense to manage the risk and administrative aspects of running a security competition, making it easier for large organisations to run crowdsourced projects like this.

Much has been written about crowdsourcing but it’s commercial fields like security testing where tapping the wisdom of the community really pays off. For some consulting firms, these services could turn out to be real threats.

Google’s locksmith problem and the perils of crowdsourcing

Google’s continued disinterest in local search continues to hurt honest business and consumers

An ongoing frustrations of this blog is Google’s failure to execute in local business search despite the massive advantage it has in that field.

One notable aspect of Google’s failure is the locksmith problem where thousands of fake businesses have slipped into the company’s database. The result is thousands of consumers being ripped off and honest local businesses being overlooked in search results.

Spam in Google’s local business search is not a new problem, Search Engine Land reported it as being an ongoing issue in 2009 and the New York Times ran a feature on it two years later highlighting how genuine local businesses and consumers suffer.

Now, five years on, the New York Times has revisited the problem of Google business listings and finds the problem hasn’t changed a great deal with locksmiths and other local search engine results being hijacked by scammers filing false listings.

It’s hard not to conclude that the local listing service isn’t really a high priority to Google’s attention deficient managers and it isn’t surprising given maintaining databases is nowhere near as sexy as being involved in moonshots or as lucrative as the company’s core adwords business.

Google’s bureaucrats think so little of the service that they give the task of maintaining its integrity to an army of unpaid volunteers. The New York Times tells the tale of one of these ‘Mappers’, an unemployed truck driver named Dan Austin, who proved so good at the role he was ‘promoted’ – still unpaid of course – and then ‘sacked’ when he demonstrated how easy it was to plant a false listing.

That weakness in Google’s system shows how crowdsourced services can be subject to abuse and how volunteers themselves are abused by companies taking advantage of ‘free’ labour.

Another weakness illustrated in the Locksmith story is the collateral damage of the ‘fail-fast’ mentality where features are released without the developers really understanding the consequences. The cost of failure may be felt by innocent parties more than the company that’s ‘failed’, as Search Engine Land flagged in its 2009 article.

Google has continued to release features into local that are open to abuse. Google has used its release early and iterate tactic to gain market share at the expense of more circumspect competitors and on the fragile incomes of small businesses.

The continued failure of Google’s local business service remains frustrating for small businesses, having destroyed the Yellow Pages and local newspaper advertising models most neighbourhood services have few places to advertise. While Google and the other internet giants remain focused on other matters, local business search remains a great opportunity for a smart entrepreneur.

Formulas for successful crowdfunding

Crowd funding is proving to be a great way to raise funds for projects, but it isn’t without its risks

Pebble have achieved the biggest Kickstarter fund raising in the service’s history with a $14 million fundraising for its latest smartwatch.

Over at competing crowdfunding service Indiegogo Flow Hives, a Tasmanian beekeeping invention, has raised nearly five million dollars for its innovative beehives that put honey on tap.

Crowdfunding is fast becoming the way for smaller manufacturers to secure preorders from the market and secure scarce capital for the business.

Pebble and Flow follow the success of Ninja Blocks who have had two successful crowdfunding ventures and their CEO Daniel Friedman spoke to Decoding The New Economy last year about raising money for hardware projects.


Not every hardware crowdfunding project works out well though as Mark Pesce described in relating his experience with the failed Moore’s Cloud fundraising. Mark said he’d “rather eat a bullet” than engage in another crowdsourcing campaign given the pressures upon manufacturers to deliver.


As Moore’s Cloud shows there are risks and complexities in looking to the crowd to raise project capital. Even a successful campaign faces potential problems in completing the project and delivering a product that meets the expectations of those who’ve contributed.

Crowdfunding has opened a new way for artists and entrepreneurs to raise funds for their projects, like all tools though it does have it’s risks and isn’t for everyone.

 

Lost in the crowdsourcing masses

Wine review app Vivino illustrates how the world is changing for experts

The crowd is as smart as wine experts claims review app Vivino in a blog post comparing its users’ ratings of wines against the long established industry standards of Wine Spectator and Robert Parker.

Crowdsourcing’s advantage claims Vivino is “the experts can’t rate everything. But 8 million (and growing) Vivino users just about can. Will a 4.0 wine on Vivino be the new ’90 point wine’?”

Although Vivino are talking up their book on this, the message here is that the wisdom of crowds – or the Cult of the Amateur as author Andrew Keen described it in 2007 – is taking the place of all but the highest profile experts’ opinions.

Removing the informed commentator

This is true in almost every critical field from journalism to food and travel writing, if you don’t have, or a can build, a big following in your chosen niche then you’re just one of the crowd punching out a blog, Facebook posts or Instagram feed.

Wine writers and experts are in the same position, if the aggregated opinions of eight million users can give you an informed opinion about a vintage then why spend good money to consult someone who has spent years studying and working in the industry?

In some ways this is the downside of blogging; suddenly anybody with an internet connection can hold themselves out as being an informed critic. A case that stands out is an Australian food blogger who criticised a Sydney cafe for it’s ‘weird sushi sandwiches’ and strange Japanese fusion food without realising he was eating a Scandinavian open sandwich.

One of the effects of the web is that it’s both diffused and concentrated influence – a vast array of informations sources meaans small international group of high profile experts find their standing grows as they become more accessible while most of the industry is drowned out by forums, apps and social media sites.

The challenge for many of us is how are we going to stand out from the crowd.

Crowdfunding as product testing

Sony’s FES watch shows the future for companies using crowdfunding to develop new products

A story from the Wall Street Journal describes how Sony have crowfunded their FES watch project, a smartwatch with an electronic paper wrist strap.

Sony’s decision to crowdfund new projects is fascinating, not least because it gives researchers and entreprenuerial employees the opportunity to commercialise projects at little cost or risk to the company but also as a powerful way to judge the market demand for an idea.

The FES watch campaign is good example how companies, big and small, can use crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. As we see more creative applications of the two concepts we may well see some radically new management methods and business models arise.

Crowdsourcing jet engines

How high tech collaboration can drive industrial innovation

Crowdsourcing, harnessing the wisdom of crowds, has been a buzzword for probably the last five years.

It’s often cited as a way for companies and entrepreneurs to access skills that have been largely unattainable in the past.

Much of the talk about crowdsourcing has revolved around consumer or marketing projects, say designing logos, and all too often the conversation revolves around getting people to do creative projects for free – the real opportunity though may well lie in the industrial sector tapping into that group wisdom.

Open innovation and jet engines

An example of how the industrial sector is using crowdsourcing is GE’s Open Innovation project where the company is offering prizes for the best ideas in developing jet engine parts and advanced 3D printing techniques.

Like the Kaggle data analysis platform, GE’s project shows that crowdsourcing isn’t just about getting a cheap logo or comparing shoe designs, it can be used to develop high tech equipment.

Another example of high level crowdsourcing is the DARPA Robotics Challenge where the US military research agency found that enthusiastic amateurs, motivated students and wily entrepreneurs were able to get results that decades of consulting from major defense contractors could achieve as a New Yorker story on Google’s robotic cars describes;

In one year, they’d made more progress than DARPA’s contractors had in twenty. “You had these crazy people who didn’t know how hard it was,” Thrun told me. “They said, ‘Look, I have a car, I have a computer, and I need a million bucks.’ So they were doing things in their home shops, putting something together that had never been done in robotics before, and some were insanely impressive.” A team of students from Palos Verdes High School in California, led by a seventeen-year-old named Chris Seide, built a self-driving “Doom Buggy” that, Thrun recalls, could change lanes and stop at stop signs. A Ford S.U.V. programmed by some insurance-company employees from Louisiana finished just thirty-seven minutes behind Stanley. Their lead programmer had lifted his preliminary algorithms from textbooks on video-game design.

The maturing of various technologies like 3D printing, big data and collaboration software are making it easier to democratise and open the innovation process, as DARPA found this can also save costs and accelerate development cycles.

Balancing crowdsourcing

GE’s Chief Economist Marco Marco Annunziata sees engineering crowdsourcing as an opportunity to move faster and harness skills even companies as big as his struggle to find, “how much of the innovation process do you keep in house?” He asks.

That’s a balance many managers are going to consider as they find their markets evolving faster than the capabilities of their own designers and development processes. It may well be that many will find their future innovations come from outside their organisations.

The madness of crowds – ABC Nightlife with Tony Delroy

On the May 2013 Nightlife radio show Tony Delroy and Paul Wallbank discuss crowdsourcing and crowdfunding

Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightife across Australia to discuss how technology affects your business and life. For May 2013 we’ll be looking at crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

The show will be available on all ABC Local stations and streamed online through the Nightlife website.

If you missed the show, you can download it from the Nightlife with Tony Delroy webpage.

Some of the topics we’ll discuss include the following;

  • what is crowdfunding?
  • how does it differ from crowdsourcing?
  • some people say crowdsourcing is a huge cost saver for business, is it?
  • crowdsourcing can be controversial as well, who get upset by it?
  • for creatives like musicians, writers and artists a lot are trying crowdsourcing, how is it going?
  • can crowdsourcing save journalism?
  • what are the ptifalls with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding

Some crowdsourcing and outsourcing resources we’ll mention include;

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

Open source manufacturing

Open source hardware promises to change manufacturing and resurrect the art of soldering

Chinese business website Caixin Online has a great video on China’s Open Source Hardware Movement, this is an area that promises to change the manufacturing industry.

Open Source is the philosophy of sharing intellectual property and allowing anyone to improve the idea on the proviso they share their changes with the rest of the world.

The hope is that open sourced products end up being more reliable than proprietary designs due to scrutiny from hundreds, or thousands, of reviewers.

Until recently, open source has been largely restricted to the software world but now it’s moving into broader Engineering and manufacturing circles.

As the Caixin video shows, the open source hardware movement is introducing geeks to a tool which many thought was dead – the soldering iron.

I noticed this a week or so ago when I walked into a co-working space and found the lady I was meeting hunched over a soldering iron putting together a part for a quadcopter.

Right now soldering parts to build quadcopters or game controllers is just the beginning, the really interesting things start when open source meets 3D printing – then we’ll see some real game changing things happen.

Soldering iron picture courtesy of Bomazi through Wikimedia Commons.

Hanging on the telephone

Is there a digital divide appearing in customer support services.

Ever tried to call an online company about a problem? As the New York Times explains, it’s often hard to find the telephone number, let alone someone to answer your call.

The NY Times article worries a new type of digital divide is appearing between those happy to do business using email or social media and those who who demand to speak to someone.

In reality, the truth is more subtle than just generational differences – it’s about the web2.0 service-free business model where few, if any, resources are spent on customer support. The idea is the an assistance can be given out on “self service” basis through a website or, better still, crowdsourced on a user forum where the customers work together to figure out solutions themselves.

For many of the web based cloud computing and social media businesses, this model is essential to their survival. If you were to add a customer support department answering telephones, the viability of the business would collapse.

While it’s uncertain if that business model is sustainable for many of these web based companies, it’s interesting to ponder how many phone calls most businesses could avoid by having relevant information on their website.

It’s worthwhile looking at call logs and asking your staff what are the most common questions to your business. Answering those on the company web site might mean happier customers and fewer staff distractions.

For some businesses, letting customers discuss issues in an online company forum might be a way of crowdsourcing support and giving ideas for future products or service improvements.

Rather than leaving customers and staff hanging on the phone, having relevant and helpful information on the website saves everybody time and money.

Risks and opportunities in crowdsourcing

There are real benefits and dangers for business in the globally connected marketplace

Crowdsourcing and offshoring are changing bringing to small business the same changes we’ve seen in manufacturing and low level office jobs over the last forty years.

Those trends are going to affect local businesses – particularly the home based service providers – in a serious way as the local web designer and bookkeeper find themselves undercut by freelancers in countries where an Australian day rate is a month’s pay.

With those thoughts in mind I went along to a round table discussion with crowdsourcing advocate Ross Dawson, Freelancer CEO Matt Barrie and Design Crowd founder Alec Lynch to hear them discuss some of the issues around the concept ahead of their half day workshops in Sydney later this months.

Having read Ross’ recent book, Getting Results From Crowds, many of the concepts and arguments are familiar but its worthwhile considering how the trend of a globalised workforce is changing.

The benefits of crowdsourcing services

Crowdsourcing services like Design Crowd and Freelancer have benefits traditional outsourcing services don’t have.

Alec Lynch describes these as reduced expense, speed and risk. A broad range of cheap, accessible suppliers mean businesses aren’t locked into costly contracts with the attendant risks while they can bring projects to fruition in days.

Until recently, globalisation only bought benefits for major corporations with manufacturers contracting work out to China, back office functions to India and software development to Eastern Europe.

The rise of web based services where smaller, one off projects could be paid for by credit card has bought global outsourcing into the small and medium sized business markets.

Now local businesses are affected by business practices that, until recently, were the concern of those working for large organisations.

This is bad news for local service businesses; the suburban web designer or bookkeeper is now finding themselves competing with individuals who, as Matt Barrie points out, have a very good weeks’ income for the equivalent of a day’s pay in Australia.

Basically the same forces that drove most low value manufacturing offshore are now driving services and white collar jobs the same way.

Responding to the threat

There are major downsides for clients using these project based outsourcing services; for instance designing a logo is only part of a much bigger branding exercise which in turn has to be considered against the orgainisation’s longer term objectives.

Often, most of us don’t know what we don’t know and that’s the real reason why we hire an expert to explain why a logo should look a certain way, an expense should be allocated to one specific cost centre and not another or why we should one software package over another.

When we outsource our services, particularly to a low cost provider, we lose that expert insight and end up with someone just carrying out a task; it is up to us to supervise something we probably don’t understand ourselves.

Part of that supervisory role is project management, in the design field managing creatives can be like herding cats. This is why experienced project managers are worth their weight in gold.

Like many essential skills, project management is one of those which most of us don’t have and is chronically undervalued but when a business is outsourcing to a freelancer in Estonia or Eritrea then this service is essential.

Providing those skilled supervisor and management roles is where the opportunities lie in a crowdsourced market place.

In many ways, we’re seeing the end result of the post-industrial society. Just as we offshored the manufacturing industries through the 1970s and 80s then the low skilled office work in the 1990s and 2000s, we’re now outsourcing local services to low cost countries.

Whether ultimately this is a good thing or not is a big question but for local businesses, the trend is clear and much of the basic work is going offshore. Those who choose to whinge rather than adapt will be left behind.

Book review: Getting Results from Crowds

Ross Dawson and Steve Bynghall look at how crowdsourcing works

One of the consequences of the Internet becoming accessible to the most of the world’s population is the rise of crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing, the concept of tapping the wisdom or skills of large groups of people, changes the economics of many industries.

Getting Results From Crowds by Ross Dawson and Steve Bynghall look at how crowdsourcing works and the strategies for those who want to use crowdsourcing services and those providing them.

An important part of the book for those new to the concept to crowdsourcing are the comprehensive definitions of exactly what it is, the benefits, the ethics and situations where it may not work.

In examining the pitfalls, Dawson and Bynghall make Getting Results From Crowds a valuable guide that gives a realistic view for managers, business owners, entrepreneurs and activists to evaluate where crowdsourcing works best.

A refreshing point with the book is that it doesn’t fixate on price; much of what has been written about crowdsourcing has focused on “free” services where organisations call groups together to contribute their time.

While there have been some notable successes in this – Wikipedia and the Guardian newspaper’s corralling its readers to evaluate the UK Parliamentary expenses scandal are two – Ross and Steve point out in their Key Principles of outsourcing that cost should not be the driving factor;

The initial attraction to crowdsourcing for many businesspeople is the potential reduce costs. While this is a valid objective, minimizing fees paid rarely leads to optimal outcomes.

Where the guide does miss the mark is the sheer scope of what the authors try to cover and many of concepts discussed don’t sit under the crowdsourcing definition but are more akin to outsourcing, or as one of the new buzzwords calls it, cloudsourcing.

Many of the concepts discussed in the book are more about using crowds to tender for a project such as service marketplaces like O-Desk and Freelancer.

One of the problems with outsourcing is that many businesses and government organisations don’t have the skills required to specify, select and manage outsourced staff. Ross and Steve identify this and devote most of the book to the challenges of managed outsourced and crowsourced projects.

Getting Results from Crowds is an important book for those wanting harness the global workforce effectively for their organisation and business.

If you’re considering using crowdsourcing or outsourcing platforms, Getting Results From Crowds is a good starting place for understanding how to use these tools.