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

Competitive intelligence (CI) is a craft used primarily by large, multinational corporations—think Nestle, IBM, and Novartis—to steer strategy. Keeping an eye on technology developments, competitor sales data, or the movements of key industry players are all common CI practices and, while many may confuse CI with corporate espionage, most of

The Data Day Texas conference in Austin once again brought together hundreds of folks in the Texas big data community for one data-filled day. Here are the presentations that we thought were “best of show.” Lisa Green, Director of Common Crawl, discussed the challenges of capturing open data at web

In 2010, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) posited the three conditions that would make crowdsourcing a common, everyday process. Over the last five years crowdsourcing has matured a lot, and it seems these three conditions have now been met. These are the three requirements the authors suggested. 1. What

The Crowdsourcing Week DC Summit (their first US event) was a fascinating look at the broad range of work now processed by the crowd. From citizen volunteers collecting data for scientific research to Latin American homeowners collecting ambient sound data to train intelligent assistants such as Alexa and Cortana, the

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

Large media companies are moving away from paying in-house staff to create proprietary online content and favoring two lower-cost models for content creation — user-generated content (UGC) and crowdsourcing-generated content (CGC). Since these two approaches are often confused with each other, it’s worth looking more closely at the real differences

Crowdsourcing platforms give users a suite of tools to administer crowdsourced projects and access an on-demand pool of cloud labor. Social media sentiment analysis, image metadata appending, and data gathering tasks are routinely crowdsourced. Up-front investments are minimal. Other advantages include super-fast turnaround times and vast scalability. Currently, the primary