Today I attended a seminar on Enterprise Crowdsourcing presented by Prof. Erran Carmel from Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington DC.
Crowdsourcing is a form of outsourcing that works on the premise of tapping into online workers on demand, and paying these workers a very small portion of money in return for very small contributions of work.
Prof. Carmel actually stated that he preferred the term "The Human Cloud" over "Crowdsourcing" as it is a better suggestion of labor markets.
I learned that all the biggest enterprises are doing this, including companies such as IBM and Google.
Some of the examples he gave that caught my attention included
Amazon - Are seen as the crowdsourcing "giants" and one of the founders of this sector with their Amazon Mechanical Turk
Zappos - An online retailing company that discovered that the grammatical correctness of their product reviews effected sales so they used crowdsourcing to clean up up the English of their reviews!.
Text eagle - In Kenya m-Pesa was used to transfer small amounts of money via mobile to individuals who carried out tiny tasks on their 2G mobiles.
Microsoft - The company wanted to test its Security Essentials product globally and used uTest to assist them in this.
Genpact - is a business process management company that created their own crowdsourcing platform.
He also wore a pair of Google's latest Google glass glasses, if that's how you say it!? It was interesting to see a pair of these in the flesh and watch him record and take photos on it. I loved hearing about his review as much of it wasn't necessarily what Google would want you to hear. Some of his comments included:
- That the glasses "didn't do enough for him"; the apps were limited.
- He used it mostly for taking pictures and video recording.
- It was somewhat uncomfortable for him to wear the glasses and deal with curious stares from others.
- If he wanted to put sunglasses on he couldn't!
- The battery life was very limited - it would die after 30 minutes of recording.
Although he was critical he felt sure that it was nothing Google couldn't solve in the near future, but his gut feeling was that Google Glass is perhaps not 100% ready for the market as of yet.
One thing he was sure of was that within the next ten years we would be most definitely all wearing wearable technology and that privacy would be a thing of the past! He seemed a little too sure of this to be honest which actually scared me a little! I'd like to think my privacy would be somewhat intact no matter how far into the future I could see!
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