Crowdsourcing’s Coming of Age?
This year has already seen several major accomplishments for providers of crowdsourcing solutions. Clickworker, headquartered in Germany and provider of business services including SEO text creation and data authentication, in March announced the close of a 4.25 Million € Series B round of financing. About the same time, San Francisco- based Crowdflower announced that it has raised $7 million in its second round of funding. The second round of funding, used to spin out additional niche services for outsourcing, was oversubscribed.
Business School professor and blogger, Panos Ipeirotis, writes an interesting post explaining what he sees as being behind the rise in solutions that target a very specific vertical.
Using direct tools such as Mechanical Turk is costly and cannot be done effectively by amateurs, says Ipeirotis. “The interface needs to be professionally designed, quality control needs to be done intelligently, and the crowd needs to be managed in the same way that any employee is managed.”
He goes on to compare the trend to the rise of vertical solutions that signified a coming of age during web search development. As providers like AltaVista started being spammed and full of irrelevant results, the door was open for the rise of topic-specific search engines to solve those problems by limiting searches to pages within a given topic.
“This industry growth is a result of customers beginning to embrace the myriad benefits this type of outsourcing brings to their market development and deployment efforts,” says says CEO of U.S. Operations for Clickworker, Greg Curhan.
IdeaConnection realizes the value of a vertical crowdsourcing platform focused on R&D. Attention to detail is critical, from assembling participants with very specific credentials and experience and assigning a moderator to act as a catalyst to advance in-depth discussion around interesting ideas. It’s all part of defining the next generation of crowdsourcing.
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