All businesses struggle with seasonality or variability in their labor requirements, in one way or another. Resort hotels are busy in summer and much slower in winter. Tax preparation firms are swamped during the April crunch. Alaskan seafood operations work around the clock in summer and then stop completely in
New product development for information services is a risky business. It takes deep customer insight, rigorous data analysis, management buy-in, and no small amount of gumption for a new information service to succeed. The variables involved in success include: An unmet need: The solution to one or more of a
Information Evolution is proud to be a part of the upcoming CrowdSourcingWeek Summit in Washington DC on June 15th. The one-day program will focus on the second wave of the crowd economy with domestic and international industry-leading professionals sharing how crowdsourcing is reshaping industries and transforming organizations today. Open innovation,
At IEI, we’re intimately familiar with the “demand side” of public information. It’s rare, though, that we get a glimpse of the issues facing public sector managers on the front lines of supplying that information. That’s just what we got when we were asked to participate in the City of
Back in 1994 I sketched out an outline for the hoovers.com business model that relied on one simple idea: using content to drive marketing. The underlying model was basically the same as a magazine – charge for subscriptions; run advertising – but since Hoover’s (then The Reference Press) had basically
On April 15th IEI’s Matt Manning spoke at the CASE District 4 Conference in Houston where he addressed an audience of alumni relations professionals. He discussed IEI’s recent experience updating an alumni database with the same tools IEI uses on B2B lists—web monitoring, Internet research, crowdsourcing, and telephone verification. The
Taking information at face value is a risky proposition, as Gary Hoover (formerly of Hoover’s and four other companies launched over the course of his career to date), pointed out last week in a Fundamentals of Business Research presentation, part of the University of Texas’s Information Institute‘s “Boiling The Ocean:
Some analyses of crowdsourcing have described it as a form of “social” network. But is crowdsourcing really social? Can paid work be social? Government, nonprofit, and even some commercial firms use volunteers for crowdsourced tasks. Volunteer-based crowdsourcing is inherently more social than the semi-anonymous piecework of commercial crowdsourcing, because the
During this pandemic, the value of accurate data has never been more obvious. Without reliable information derived from the mountains of data being generated by fast-moving events the actions necessary to slow the outbreak are impossible to make. From the data-gathering process to the intelligent analysis of that data by
The term “crowdsourcing” is not aging well. Maybe it was a bit too folksy to begin with or, more probably, its slow evolution caused it to seem passé before it ever even hit its stride. Whatever the reason, the meaning of “the crowd” has morphed into two distinct things at
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