The last holiday season was replete with the sound of ads for Amazon Echo, Apple Home, Google Home, and Microsoft Cortana. All these products promise their owners the ability to speak aloud and have the receiving device trigger specific actions such as turning on the heat or reading the results
What happens when you have more metadata for a database record than there are fields of data in the original record itself? If you’re like almost every other company in the world you don’t have to imagine this scenario. It’s a reality you’ve lived with for quite some time. Every
Now that the frenzy of South By Southwest Interactive has settled down, we wanted to share some of the new types of projects that emerged in the first quarter of 2014. Crowdsourced Image Analysis: Using the crowd for business-to-business competitive intelligence projects based on satellite imagery. Once confined to national
In crowdsourcing, cheating is a common problem, and it’s a two-way street: requesters can manipulate and deceive workers just as workers can con a requester. Everyone involved needs to be creative and cautious to avoid getting taken. For example, many crowdsourcing managers use looping—asking a question multiple times to generate
The models for information services are based on two basic revenue streams: advertising and subscriptions. There are a few free services based on donations (a loosey-goosey form of subscription), some pay-per-use services (a limited form of “subscription”), and a lot of services that blend the two streams in different proportions.
Most open data — data that’s free to use, reuse, and redistribute — is public information that governments publish as a key part of “transparency” initiatives. It can be a boon to information services already skilled in curating and adding value to public information, though these companies often struggle with
Last week the Times-Picayune, one of the most respected newspapers in the world, acted like it did not want to “go gently into that good night” and become a footnote in Wikipedia. We have come to expect spineless fatalism in the newspaper business (when they are not bribing policemen or
One of the most underappreciated aspects of the rise of crowdsourcing is that it’s laying the groundwork for a fundamental change in the very nature of work. The construct of the M-F, 9am-5pm, on-site, day job is now only marginally workable. Employers find it more difficult to get demonstrable ROI
Our society’s move to digital has given rise to enormous uncertainty in legal quarters. Specifically, the ownership of information has never been more unclear at a time when we’re inundated with ever-increasing volumes of data. We got into this situation because of: the assertion of private rights over public data
New products come and go. The very best thrive for decades. Every once in a blue moon comes an idea so perfectly timed and executed that it could literally last forever. LinkedIn is one of those products—a cocktail napkin of an idea that changed the world of business overnight. It
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