Mob4Hire pegged a perfect opportunity to call in a crowd.  Mobile application providers struggle to get their wares tested on all handsets, on all carriers, around the world.  Add in location-based services and it becomes pretty much impossible to create a test-environment. Now with almost 10,000 handsets on more than 288 operators in 102 countries worldwide, Mob4hire has become the leader in crowdsourced mobile application functional and usability testing, worthy of recognition among the Red Herring Top 100 technology companies for 2009.

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This past Thursday evening, I attended the Web2Summit Planning Dinner in San Francisco. I attended the Web2Summit last year when the topic was Web Meets World and found it inspiring to be surrounded by very smart and generous people. 

The planning dinner was at the Foreign Cinema Café, definitely one of the coolest venues around. Great food and a room packed with about 150 interesting people. 

I thought the event would be more of a collaborative discussion of what Web2Summit should look like this year. Instead, there were three questions for us to answer at our tables. I sat with Greg Kerwin, of TechWeb; Wadooah Wali and Joe Perez, from Demand Media; and Bill Harris, the former CEO of Paypal and Intuit. 

Here were my thoughts on the discussion… 

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We’re not saying they’re the best, we’re just saying we don’t know how we survived without them…

P&G Connect and Develop  – Think of a Venn Diagram consisting of three circles, what consumers need, what’s possible through P&G and what’s possible with the world’s innovation. The intersection of the three helps P&G deliver things we can’t live without, including Swiffer Dusters and Bounce Dryer Sheets.

Trip Advisor  – Have you ever thought you booked a vacation to a single’s resort, only to arrive surrounded by screaming children? Never make that mistake again! See what other traveller’s though, check out their real photos (not the retouched website ones) and find the top vacations you never even knew you wanted to go on.

Amazon’s “also bought”  – about halfway down the page of a book review, Amazon has a list of books people bought alongside the book you are reviewing. Sure, it is good for business, but it also ends up being great for reading discovery, whether it is finding out about a book that is similar to your favourite, or what to buy your nephews for Christmas.

Wikipedia  – written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. Anyone with internet access can make changes to Wikipedia articles, so we strongly suggest fact-checking before citing Wikipedia. Regardless, it is the best place to start research on…anything, really.

Netflix  – Ranking movies is pretty subjective. How do you accurately predict how much someone is going to love a movie based on their previous movie preferences? Netflix offers up cash prizes to anyone that can significantly improve their algorithm – and our Saturday nights improve.

Read what others have to say about crowdsourcing, or stay tuned for future examples of crowdsourcing we love. We’ll touch on stuff that make our lives cooler and others’ lives better. Even better – let us know what you consider to be the best of crowdsourcing.

Cheers,

Patrick

“What’s the pay off of crowdsourcing?” That’s the question I hear from every executive or manager that I talk to. As companies punch a new holes in their belts to tighten further, everyone is asking how to continue innovating, while reducing costs. Is that even possible? In fact, yes. Economic downturns are a hotbed of breakthroughs. The phrase, “necessity is the mother of all invention” didn’t come out of nowhere!

So why make the shift to open innovation right now? Bottom line: For profit and market leadership. Crowdsourcing has proven to be the most ingenious means to predict and deliver on what the market wants, plus it brings your organization closer to those stakeholders that are most passionate, good or bad. Here are four business cases where we see crowdsourcing paying off

The Four Go-To Ways of Crowdsourcing

• Market prediction
• Product or business innovation
• Research discovery
• Brand Collaboration

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