Like any language, crowdsourcing jargon has morphed over time. Some terms have been around for years and are very familiar, while others are relatively new and reflect crowdsourcing’s ongoing evolution. Here are some must-know terms for talking about crowdsourcing in 2014. Crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing uses online marketplaces, in particular Amazon Mechanical
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.
Recently, I had the honor of delivering a guest lecture at The Information School at The University of Texas in Austin, which is proudly my alma mater. The class was Human Computation & Crowdsourcing, taught by Dr. Matt Lease. It was a sincere privilege for me and for IEI to
“Using your proprietary data in news stories is the best possible kind of promotion for your paid data products because it shows clearly how valuable and useful your datasets are.” Words of wisdom from Infocommerce Group. Data visualizations, particularly maps displaying data, are the latest fashion. These maps are only
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
Recently, CrowdFlower blogged about de-duplicating records in a merged CRM database using crowdsourcing. The article suggested that this kind of data is often too wildly divergent to be de-duped automatically. At IEI, we’ve found: Most CRM data is similar (first name, last name, email, phone, etc.) and easy to standardize
Heat maps—data represented graphically with individual values represented by colors—are an increasingly popular way to quickly convey a lot of information. To demonstrate this, we at IEI recently used a set of data on private investments made in the U.S. thus far in 2013 (data courtesy of our friends at
Information services are just that: services. Even if you call your customers subscribers and deliver your product to them by mail, in the end you’re performing a service on a regular basis in exchange for regular payments. You’ve crossed the boundary between products and services even further if you’d be
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