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

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

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

This tool from Crowd Computing Systems automates crowdsourcing projects. We use it at IEI to run campaigns on the Amazon Mechanical Turk, the world’s largest crowdsourcing platform. (More on WorkFusion.) We use WorkFusion for a variety of processes. It works for simple, low-end tasks such as appending URLs, email addresses,

Often, a company has had one of two experiences with crowdsourcing on their own. They have either been frustrated by poor data generated by an unwieldy crowd or they have simply been unable to gather consistent results. When those companies go to an expert in managed crowdsourcing, they typically start

Scalable bandwidth and burstable work pools are both terms used to describe crowdsourcing. Both of these terms, however, imply that workers are anonymous ID numbers performing tasks remotely and this can be dehumanizing to them. Because of this aspect of crowdsourcing, manager interaction with crowd workers is critical and improves

Getting the right workers is critically important for most managed crowdsourcing projects. Success depends on a pool of workers who understand and can do the tasks involved. So, while it’s certainly possible to open a project up to the entire crowd and then start blocking poor performers along the way,

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