It never ceases to amaze me how far crowdsourcing has come - and how far it is going to go.
Crowdsourcing, for those that don't know is "a neologistic compound of Crowd and Outsourcing for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an "open call" to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions." (Wikipedia). The term was popularized by a book of the same name by Jeff Howe.
Popular examples of crowdsourcing is open source code - it's the backbone of many internet applications and is continually designed by a collection of highly skilled developers, who continually add to the product and tweak it to make it better. Wordpress, for instance, is a open source blogging tool. Anyone can change the tool to make it better. This tool, blogger, owned by Google, however, is not.
But now, crowdsourcing is no longer just about code and techies - it's now about products!
Threadless, which leverages a network of designers, crowdsources T-shirt designs. A designer contributes a design, gets it rated, and if it gets selected by the mass as "good" wins $2000 for his design and the recognition of the community.
Today, I just discovered Quirky, which takes threadless beyond t-shirts to actual products or gadgets - you know those cool things you discover in random cutesie shops, and even in the ol' sharper image - well this site is for them. They have cups with stirrers made to hang off the side, squeeze oranges + drink in the same cup, ipod cases with kickstands, and other cool products.
What other cool crowdsourcing products have you found?
@mbastartupgirl
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