Crowdsourcing is a recently coined term for a business model that depends on work being done outside the traditional company walls: while outsourcing is typically performed by lower paid professionals, crowdsourcing relies on a combination of volunteers and low-paid amateurs who use their spare time to create content, solve problems, or even do corporate R&D.
Business Week tallies up a nice list of 5 promising crowdsourcing initiatives: A Swarm of Angels, Crowd Spirit, Marketocracy, CafePress, and Gannett. It’ll be interesting to see how these 5 efforts pan out and whether they will deliver the efficiency and cost-effectiveness that crowdsourcing promises.
P.S. Also check out a useful post by Lionel David, founder of Crowd Spirit, on my linkroll. I hope you have been using the linkroll. It contains the best posts that I encounter while browsing the blogfeeds that I have subscribed to. So I have read 1,668 posts (as per Google Reader) and have shared the best 38 on my linkroll. If you are reading this in a newsreader, click here to go straight to the linkroll.
Thanks a lo Sharad Sharma for this post and also for having included my post on your linkroll !!!. I hope that the next posts will also be usefull for you.
best regards
Lionel, CrowdSpirit Founder