Chapter 22

Ten Success Stories

In This Chapter

Getting expert help with mobile app development

Creating a video campaign to boost a brand

Using the crowd to further medical research

Finding financing for a start-up with crowdfunding

When you start crowdsourcing, make a start by looking around at other people’s successes – projects that worked well, by one measure or another. Every success story can teach you a little lesson about crowdsourcing that you may not be able to learn any other way.

In this chapter, I serve up ten varied stories of crowdsourcing projects. Some of these projects started a new business; many of them helped individuals do something that they couldn’t have done by themselves. All are examples of how crowdsourcing has worked successfully.

Creating the SXSW Festival T-shirt

More than any other form of crowdsourcing, crowdcontests show you what the crowd’s thinking. You discover ideas that the crowd thinks are cool, interesting and intriguing. Because of this, many art festivals use crowdcontests to design their advertisements.

The SXSW festival, a major arts fair in Austin, Texas, USA, has long been promoting audience participation. The organisers were crowdsourcing before they entirely knew what crowdsourcing was. They asked for help from the crowd to prepare programmes, design posters and create T-shirts. When they started, such things were identified as audience outreach or market engagement. Now they’re known as crowdsourcing and they reach a much, much larger audience.

In 2010, SXSW organisers (the initials stand for South by Southwest) used the crowdsourcing platform 99designs to crowdsource its T-shirt. They followed the standard process, paid less than $1,000 (£630) for a contest, received back about 500 designs, reviewed the submissions and selected a winner. The designs they received from the crowd suggested that SXSW is seen as a global phenomenon, one which presents ideas that engage people in their early 20s. As a result of this, the T-shirt designs repeated images of music, technology and games. Few made any reference to the Texan culture that had once been a hallmark of the festival. (You can check out the designs the organisers received at http://99designs.com/t-shirt-design/contests/design-official-t-shirt-sxsw-30498.)

The success in this story is found both at the festival and in crowdsourcing itself. In using 99designs, SXSW organisers acknowledged that they were ready to reach a larger audience and get a more professional group of designers working on their festival. SXSW was once just a small regional festival, whose organisers chose designers from the music fans who attended the concerts. Designing for the festival has now become a much bigger activity that covers more topics and deserves a more professional approach.

The SXSW contest demonstrated not only that event organisers can obtain good and inexpensive designs through crowdsourcing, but also that they were able to understand their audience better by reviewing the submissions to the contest. They saw a tool that can give them a lot of useful information.

Developing Smith & Kraus’s Mobile App

Smith & Kraus is a publisher of plays (about as far from high technology as you can get!). The company’s experience of crowdsourcing showed that not only can a first-time crowdsourcer get a good result from a macrotasking website, she can also get a good technical product.

The managing partner wanted a mobile phone app to sell the publisher’s material to actors and directors. She decided that the company couldn’t afford a full-time developer and concluded that the best way to get an app would be to advertise for a student. However, she didn’t know any students, didn’t know how to find students, and really didn’t know how to tell a student what she wanted or how she’d know when the app was doing what she wanted it to do. She really wanted a professional app developer, but didn’t think she could afford one.

After looking at different alternatives, she was directed to the macrotasking sites oDesk and Elance. She gave these sites a try even though she wasn’t sure she could make them work properly or could even communicate with a professional software developer. She was a professional publisher who’d spent her career in theatre. She knew how to talk with artists, but had no idea how to talk with engineers.

The macrotasking sites proved to be easier to use than she anticipated. She got some help writing a description of her app and found a macrotasker who both understood what she needed and had the experience to fill in the gaps in her description. The app worked when it was delivered and was deployed on schedule. The project was all done, much to the publishing manager’s surprise, under her own control.

Spending Time with Mr Bentham

The philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) would probably have been sympathetic to crowdsourcing. He was, after all, an eminently practical man who promoted a philosophy called utilitarianism. ‘It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people,’ he said, ‘which is the measure of right and wrong.’

Mr Bentham also had an innovative side that would have enjoyed working with the crowd. He stated that he wanted his embalmed body, dressed and upright, displayed in University College London (UCL). It remains on display there and apparently even attends faculty meetings.

Only Bentham's published works and a few documents are currently in print, so UCL's library is running a crowdsourced project to transcribe his manuscript papers (see http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham). The project follows the usual kind of process. The library is posting Bentham's 8,178 manuscripts and calling in the crowd to transcribe and check them. At the time of writing, about 60 per cent of the manuscripts have been transcribed. Scholarly transcription is an expensive and time-consuming job. Crowdsourcing lowers the cost of this work and speeds up the process.

The impact of this project will be measured over decades, not days. Jeremy Bentham helped lay the foundation for the Victorian period and for the modern age. His writings encouraged the political leadership of the UK to measure social progress in concrete ways. An yet, without the transcriptions, we really don’t know the nature of his influence. We don’t know with whom he corresponded, how he combined ideas or how he worked with others. The transcripts will provide that information and help everyone to spend a little more time in the company of Jeremy Bentham.

Generating a New Movie Recommendation Method for Netflix

Often, self-organised crowds can tell you the most about crowd behaviour because they’re finding out about themselves as they’re doing their work. The Netflix prize remains one of the great successes of self-organised crowds, because it produced a new way of understanding how people make purchasing decisions. To achieve that understanding, members of the crowd had to cooperate and compete. The contest staff closely monitored the progress of the crowd and encouraged the participants to work together.

Netflix, a company that distributes movies over the Internet, created the contest to generate a new method of recommending movies to customers. The company posted a set of data on the web that showed what customers had rented and offered $1 million (£630,000) to devise a method that could predict the movies that customers would like.

The company ran the contest in two stages. It used the first stage not only to identify good ideas but also to push the best contestants into teams. The final team, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, combined researchers from two groups that had done well in the preliminary round. The goal of the contest was to create a program that could predict which movies customers would rent based on the movies they’d already watched. Netflix already had a program that made such predictions, but it sometimes made errors and predicted the wrong movie. The combined group ultimately created a new program that reduced the error rate by 10.6 per cent.

Building a National Treasure Trove

The Australia National Library Trove Project (check it out at http://trove.nla.gov.au) is more than just a crowdsourcing project. It's a collection of material about Australia that combines the resources of a thousand libraries, offers issues of newspapers and other publications, presents manuscripts and even offers archives for old websites. Several aspects of Trove involve crowdsourcing. The project offers a wiki – a reference website that's built and edited by the crowd – to enable members of the public to accumulate their knowledge, and gives the crowd the ability to tag and describe elements of the collection.

Trove also maintains a large collection of modern photographs of Australia that it's collected with the help of the photo-sharing site Flickr (www.flickr.com). With Flickr, Trove has been able to request photographs from the crowd and allow anyone to view and use them. Over 3,000 people have contributed over 100,000 images.

The Trove archive enables Australians to document the present without going through the traditional process of curation. It allows the crowd to identify the images that are important to them and to create a portrait of modern life. According to the project managers, Trove is already one of the most used collections of images that depict current life. (You can see the images at www.flickr.com/groups/pictureaustralia_ppe.)

Running a Video Campaign for Audio-Technica

Audio-Technica used a crowdcontest to help it get a stronger position in the US headphone market. The company hadn’t done well in the USA in spite of producing critically acclaimed products. To overcome this problem, the company decided to start a new video advertising campaign. Instead of going to a conventional ad agency, it went to GeniusRocket, a crowdsourced video production firm.

GeniusRocket held a curated crowdcontest for Audio-Technica, a type of contest in which the judges review the submissions and offer suggestions before making the final decision. The winner captured the desire of the crowd in a way that few could explain in words. The video says that music gives life and the headphones bring music. Called 'Audio 911', it shows an emergency – a young man trembling on the brink of death. A pair of headphones pulsing with the beats of the day are placed over his ears and restore his life. The video has had over a million views on YouTube and gave a market share to Audio-Technica. (Check out the video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-Kz12Ijanw.)

Getting USA Today on Mobile Phones

USA Today is skilled at dealing with technical services. For 30 years, the company has published a global newspaper, a task that’s required it to coordinate the efforts of writers, printers, delivery drivers and others employers around the globe. In 2011, the company decided to deliver the news to a mobile app. Despite the experience of those at USA Today, they knew that this task wouldn’t be easy. As they prepared it, they quickly realised that their app would have to operate in hundreds of different environments, even though it was perceived as a single app.

To test the new app, USA Today turned to uTest, which crowdsources software testing. The result was highly successful. The company realised the app on time and was able to show that it had few bugs. ‘There is no way to hide poor quality in the world of mobile,’ explained the app designer.

The USA Today mobile app has quickly become a major distribution channel for the newspaper. Recent statistics suggest that it accounts for roughly 25 per cent of the network views of the paper. The paper wants to be connected to its readers, and the mobile app is the quickest link for the crowd. A spokesman for the paper said that the mobile app makes USA Today ‘only an arm’s length away’.

Analysing Viruses with Foldit

Foldit is a form of self-organised crowd, although it can be viewed as a form of microtasking or even as a game. It was created by researchers at the University of Washington, USA, as a means of analysing the structure of natural proteins – but that isn’t why the crowd uses it. To the crowd, Foldit’s a game, a game in which the players try to fold a complex three-dimensional shape into a compact structure. The fact that these three-dimensional shapes represent proteins isn’t important to many of the players. It’s just part of the game.

The researchers created Foldit because they were trying to understand how proteins behave in the human system. If they could understand how proteins changed from long strings of molecules to compact structures, they reasoned, they’d better understand how the immune system works. In particular, the researchers would gain insight into the structure of one particular protein – the AIDS virus.

The researchers had written computer programs as a way of trying to fold the proteins. The programs weren’t that difficult but they demanded substantial computer time, because they blindly tested every possible combination of every possible way of folding the molecules. Humans are able to do these folds much faster. By looking at the molecule, they can judge where the molecule might fold and how it might be manipulated into a small shape.

Using Foldit, the crowd was able to analyse the structure of a virus that causes AIDS in monkeys. They analysed this structure by playing a game that encouraged them to manipulate these three-dimensional forms that happened to behave like the AIDS virus. The computer program would have taken thousands of hours to find a way of folding that virus. The crowd found one in just ten days.

Writing Descriptions for Magnum Photos

Magnum Photos is a collective founded by Henry Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and other well-known photographers. It possesses some of the most famous images from the 20th century, but most of its photographs have no description. They often have nothing more than the name of the photographer and a number.

Magnum wanted to organise, identify and describe its collection of some 600,000 images. To prepare descriptions, it had two choices. It could either hire experts to study each photo and write a summary, or it could put the photos to the crowd and let the crowd members prepare the descriptions. Magnum knew that if it hired experts, the process would cost at least $12 (£8.50) per photo, possibly more. The people at Magnum thought that the crowd would be able to do the work faster and more cheaply than experts could. However, they weren’t certain that the crowd could do the work well.

Magnum ultimately decided to employ the crowd to write the photo descriptions. The collective organised a serial crowdsourcing process that passed each photo through the hands of several members of the crowd and allowed each one to add some new information and check the work of other members. (See Chapter 16 for more on serial crowdsourcing.)

Magnum’s project isn’t yet over, but the signs of success came early on. In the course of processing some of the first pictures, the crowd discovered a file of photos taken on the set of the 1973 movie American Graffiti. They not only identified the movie stars, who didn’t always look like the characters they played in the film, they were also able to identify where the pictures were taken and what the people were doing. It was a quick demonstration of how well crowdsourcing can work.

Setting Up Coffee Joulie with the Crowd’s Backing

A modest success story suggests that coffee is almost as important to the crowd as is technology.

The company Dave & Dave came up with a new product called the Coffee Joulie, a large metal bean that you place at the bottom of your coffee mug. It absorbs heat from freshly brewed coffee and as the coffee cools, the Coffee Joulie slowly releases heat and keeps your drink warm.

Dave & Dave put a request on Kickstarter. They wanted $9,500 (£5,974) to finance the production of the first Coffee Joulies. Anyone who pledged $100 (£63) or more would receive a free set of Coffee Joulies. ‘This took off really fast, way faster than we thought it was going to,’ explained one of the Daves. ‘We just completed leapfrogged that goal in a month.’ On Kickstarter, the donors offered nearly $307,000 (£196,000).