Those of us in the information business are usually too busy working with our customers and refining our business models and production processes to think about the basic question of “What is information?” but let’s stop for a moment to consider it. Information is not a self-contained “thing” but rather
We received such a positive response to our February Crowdsourcing 102 post that we decided to follow it up with some of the questions we fielded about it, all answered by our resident managed crowdsourcing expert, Kevin Dodds. Q. Have you considered using known answers (KAs) throughout production in addition
Guessing the size of a company in a given industry based on incomplete data is among the most common tasks in the information business. Salespeople, for example, need good “size” parameters to maximize their time and correctly identify their best prospects. Managers need the same information to help them make
In the 1990s, large manufacturers spent millions on software to streamline their supply chains, and they continue to invest in refining processes to make those supply chains as efficient as possible. For those companies whose business is the manufacturing and sale of information, the redesign of “data supply chains” came
There are two primary ways to use managed crowdsourcing to collect data: result consensus analysis, and the creation of semi-private crowds. Consensus Analysis For clearly defined, “only one answer” questions—any piece of data where the format is always the same, usually a URL, an email, or a phone number—looping each
The explosion of data-driven reporting, recent data privacy legislation, and the unfortunate loss of one of the Internet’s leading lights have brought the definition of “public” data back to the forefront of discussions about the information industry. At this late date in the game, it is astounding that there is
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:
The idea of harnessing work as a utility (i.e, like flicking a switch to turn on labor “power”) is gaining traction. Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins recently included it in her list of technology trends to watch (one of the few surprises in that presentation) and Gary Swart, CEO of
Businesses based on selling data on a subscription basis are in a truly turbulent period right now. Competition from open source databases and low-cost API databases is starting to emerge and firms with killer workflow integration software are also hungrily eyeing B2B database publishers’ steady revenue streams. Adding to the
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
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