10 Crowd Sourcing Success Stories

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10 Crowdsourcing Success Stories

Kevin Casey|May 03, 2011

Developer Hackathons

Companies such as Facebook, Google, and Foursquare regularly host

events that give developers the keys to the code and let them carve it up,

all in hopes of producing innovative new applications for the platform.

At Foursquare's February hackathon, for example, 150 developers mixed

and mingled with the company's engineers and got their hands dirty with

the API. The results, according to Foursquare's blog: 25 pizza and 300cups of coffee consumed, 15 hours of coding, and 39 new apps. The

winner? The Dealio, who turned a suggestion from a Foursquare forum

into an app that enables users to leave private messages for friends when

they check in at a venue.
http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/authors/6931http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/authors/6931http://thedealio.at/http://thedealio.at/http://thedealio.at/http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/authors/6931


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Dell's IdeaStorm

The four-year-old IdeaStormsays the site "was created to give a direct

voice to our customers and an avenue to have online 'brainstorm'

sessions to allow you the customer to share ideas and collaborate with
http://www.ideastorm.com/http://www.ideastorm.com/http://www.ideastorm.com/


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one another and Dell." Those brainstorms have generated more than

15,000 ideas since the site launched, with categories ranging from

products to advertising to small business. Dell says it has implemented

432 ideas developed on the site. Among those it credits to thecommunity: Offering Linux as an operating system on Dell hardware.

IdeaStorm even solicits ideas on the ideas, holding a November "Storm

Session" to solicit feedback on the site itself.

Crowdsourcing just sounds like a buzzword, doesn't it? It has the classic

buzzword etymology: Two words smushed together to form a new one

that can then be easily deployed in all manner of marketing, media, tech,

and cocktail party contexts. But while the word might be hyped, theconcept is quite real, and has spread rapidly through the business world.

Widely credited to Wired writer Jeff Howe, the term -- like any

buzzword worth its while -- might generate a dozen definitions from as

many people. For businesses, it always involves some version of a single

company reaching out to the vast masses to fulfill some need.


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Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Talk about an online superstore: Amazon doesn't stop at books or cloud

servers -- they're in the people business, too. Mechanical Turk offers

what the company calls "an on-demand, scalable workforce." It's

essentially a mix of crowdsourcing and marketplace. Workers sign on to

perform "Human Intelligence Tasks," or HITs, and businesses -- orperhaps simply people with time and money to spare -- fund an account

and outsource their to-do list. A recent visit to the Mechanical Turk site

showed more than 114,000 HITs available. HIT requestors only pay --

and workers only get paid -- when they're satisfied with the results.
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcomehttps://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcomehttps://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome


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Vitaminwater's Flavor Creator

Vitaminwater's approach was a delicious mix of marketing and product

development. In 2009, it gave consumers the chance to hack their hydration in on

online lab that allowed them to pick the company's next flavor. It also tacked on a

$5,000 prize for the person that designed the new beverage's label. Vitaminwater's

Facebook page played an integral role -- the "lab" was really just a Facebook app --

and produced a good example of the natural intersection between social media and

various deployments of the crowdsourcing concept. The winning flavor,

Vitaminwater Connect, was announced in 2010; the label even included the

Facebook logo. Social media continues to be a big part of the company's public

presence: Today, Vitaminwater'sFacebook pageserves as its official Web site.
http://www.facebook.com/vitaminwaterhttp://www.facebook.com/vitaminwaterhttp://www.facebook.com/vitaminwaterhttp://www.facebook.com/vitaminwater


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Netflix Prize

While some crowdsourcing initiatives are long-term projects, others

have specific timelines and goals. And, in the case of theNetflix Prize, a

very specific financial reward: $1 million. Netflix put that bounty on its

well-known recommendation engine -- in non-technical terms, that thing

that suggests movies you might like -- and dared the developer universe

to come up with something better. Netflix kicked off the competition in2006 and said it would last until at least 2011, offering $50,000

"progress prizes" along the way. It didn't make it that far: In 2009, the

company awarded the $1 million to an algorithm devised by team

"BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos."
http://www.netflixprize.com/http://www.netflixprize.com/http://www.netflixprize.com/http://www.netflixprize.com/community/viewtopic.php?id=1537http://www.netflixprize.com/community/viewtopic.php?id=1537http://www.netflixprize.com/community/viewtopic.php?id=1537http://www.netflixprize.com/


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My Starbucks Idea

Starbucks often gets credit as an early success story of a big business

putting Web-based crowdsourcing into action. Dell's IdeaStorm gives a

virtual nod to My Starbucks Idea for inspiring its own ideas site, forexample. Based on the force.com platform, the Starbucks site solicits

ideas and feedback from its customers. Ideas break down into three

categories: Product, Experience, and Involvement. Since the site's

launch in 2008, caffeine junkies have ruled the roost: There have been
http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/


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more than 24,000 ideas tagged "Coffee & Espresso" alone, by far the top

sub-category. Starbucks adds a social aspect to the mix: Other users vote

on submitted ideas; there's even a leader board to keep score. The Ideas

In Action section tracks suggestions that the company is takingseriously, from review through launch. A recent example: Starbucks just

made Hawaiian Kona coffee available in all its stores as a result of a

customer idea.

Google Moderator


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To the company's credit, Moderator isn't the first listing in a Google search of "crowdsourcing" --

it doesn't even appear on page one. But Google Moderator is decidedly crowdsource-y -- its

slogan is "Helping the world find the best input from an audience of any size." The platform

enables users to make suggestions and others to vote on them. Moderator can be embedded on

Google Sites pages, and the API is exposed for other uses. There's also a Moderator for Android.

But the most interesting integration might be Moderator on YouTube, which applies the same

crowd-based wisdom to video submissions. No matter the medium -- text, video, smartphone --

Moderator provides a free, ready-made crowdsourcing platform.

Proctor & Gamble's Connect + Develop
http://www.google.com/moderator/http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=179865http://www.google.com/moderator/


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Armchair inventors and future patent holders of the world, unite! Proctor & Gamble, with its

storied history in the broad consumer products industry, launched its "Connect + Develop" portal

to develop new products and services outside of the company. Rather than call it crowdsourcing,

P&G goes with "open innovation." On the Connect + Develop Web site, chief technology officer

Bruce Brown defines open innovation as "the practice of accessing externally developed

intellectual property in your own business and allowing your internally developed assets and

know-how to be used by others." The company says it has entered more than 1,000 active

agreements with partners as a result of the site. Paranoid inventors, take heart: Unlike some open

communities in the crowdsourcing vein, you submit your ideas privately through Connect +

Develop's secure site.

uTest


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Got bugs? The crowdsourcing craze has extended beyond businesses

using the concept to become a business unto itself. Witness uTest,

which, like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, offers a ready-and-able labor

pool, only in this case with a very specific skill set: Software testing.The company offers on-demand QA for applications in the Web, mobile,

gaming, and desktop realms. It lists among its clients Google, Microsoft,

Intuit, and even the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In a sense,

uTest is a hybrid of crowdsourcing and temporary staffing. The

company claims a turnkey team of 30,000 testers across 165 countries,

with expertise across functional, usability, Agile, and load testing

scenarios. Pricing is quote based depending on specific needs.
http://www.utest.com/http://www.utest.com/http://www.utest.com/


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Napkin Labs

You may have noticed a vocabulary trend to this point: Words like social,

innovation, idea, and community tend to crop up quite a bit in business

applications of crowdsourcing. Napkin Labs has them all covered. Don't believeme? The title tag on their homepage is "social innovation." If it's in the source

code, it must be true! Seriously, the startup's OpenLab platform enables companies

to apply crowdsourcing and its various related principles -- community building,

gaming fundamentals, project management, to name a few -- to Web-based

customer outreach. In a sense, Napkin Labs is rephrasing "the customer is always

right" adage -- its site says: "Your customers are a lot more than just your

customers. They're smart, creative folks with great insights."
http://www.napkinlabs.com/http://www.napkinlabs.com/http://www.napkinlabs.com/

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10 Crowd Sourcing Success Stories