A few weeks ago, LimeExchange launched its online outsourcing marketplace to the world. The service is essentially a social network for freelancers, service providers and entrepreneurs that helps service providers matchmake themselves to buyers looking to outsource activities within those service categories.

Though marketplace services such as Guru and eLance have ably served freelancers and web workers for some time, LimeExchange seeks to differentiate itself from its predecessors by moving service marketplaces beyond simple matchmaking of buyers and sellers, to eBay-like reputation and feedback metrics that help users understand the prior reputability of their collaborators.

Like other marketplaces, LimeExchange takes a cut of a successfully completed project – quoted up frong at a hefty 8%. One curious feature enables buyers to ‘trial’ sellers with a demonstration of their abilities through a pilot project – the marketplace equivalent of paid pitching?

In other areas, LimeExchange is aping the Q&A and business networking features of LinkedIn, raising questions as to why business networks such as LinkedIn aren’t already offering this?

LimeExchange is part of a new wave of service marketplaces that’re all exploring post-Guru/eLance and post-LinkedIn opportunities that all seek to exploit advances in social networks and social media.

Marketplaces such as Kluster and Cambrian House, seek to aggregate sellers into startup opportunities with shared equity in new ventures, with varying degrees of success. Interestingly, marketplaces like New Zealand’s forthcoming Creative Federation and the UK’s bmedi@ operate tendering models which aggregate members around specific projects or tendering opportunities; bmedi@ in particular is using its position to help freelancers ‘club together’ to tackle larger tenders and promote its region’s members.

LimeExchange is currently orienting its services around design, development, media production, blogging, networking, consulting, writing, legal work, accounting, market research and administration – all areas which appear to correlate closely with our audience here.

I’m curious to hear from readers of Web Worker Daily on their experiences with such services…

• do they contribute a steady pipeline of work for you?
• what proportion of your works originates from such marketplaces?
• do you find most transactions and collaborations to be reputable?
• are the fees reasonable?
• what is lacking?

If we get enough interest responses, I’ll aim to put together a follow up post summarising people’s views.

“Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data.

The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticism.

In some cases the labor is well-compensated. In other cases the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization.

Perceived benefits of crowdsourcing include:

• Problems can be explored at comparatively little cost.
• Payment is by results.
• The organization can tap a wider range of talent than might be present in its own organisation.

The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to the public, rather than another body. The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public. In crowdsourcing the activity is initiated by a client, and the work may be undertaken on an individual, as well as a group, basis.” <wiki>

• The Rise of Crowdsourcing (Wired)
• Crowdsourcing: Consumers as Creators (BusinessWeek)
• Top 10 Crowdsourcing Companies

“Cambrian House is a web-based community owned business that combines the principles of wisdom of crowds and peer production to identify and develop sticky software ideas. The company’s stated mission is to discover and commercialize software ideas through the wisdom and participation of crowds.” <wiki> <home>

• Crowdsourcing, tracking the rise of the amateur (Jeff Howe’s blog)
• Crowdsourcing: Cambrian House – CBC: The Current

There seems to be a new craze in the design world. Crowdsourcing has become a new and innovative way to have companies to find a new logo or a new webpage (basically anything that needs designing). There are many new crowdsourcing sites popping up including: Kluster, FellowForce, Cambrian House and more recently CrowdSpring. The first three operate a little bit differently than the new CrowdSpring. They offer designers a place to collaborate on projects that are posted on the site. This creates a pool of ideas that everyone can work with to create the best solution to a posted problem or challenge. CrowdSpring offers a place for companies to post competitions to design logos and websites, or anything else that needs to be designed. The main difference is that instead of being a collaborative effort, designers must post their completed projects, not just ideas and sketches. To promote their site, CrowdSpring has a competition going to see who can come up with the best design for their home page (with the winner receiving $5,000). They also held a competition for their logo design, and it turns out that a 28-year-old janitor was the winning designer.

Professional design firms may be asking themselves why they should be happy about something that is allowing amateur designers and freelancers to compete with them on a huge scale. I’ll tell you why. Giving everyone a chance allows for greater creativity and diversity on a given project. Now that everyone is competing with each other it raises the standards of the winning design. Now it is not just one or two firms competing for the job and then taking over. When you increase the amount of players, you increase the odds of coming up with a great design.

Companies looking for design work should be super happy about his new process too. Now instead of going out and hiring a design or marketing firm to come up with their branding they can post a competition. It is much, much cheaper, and it also gives them a wider array of designs to chose from. A great example of this is DataPortability’s competition for the redesign of their logo (See the designs on Flickr). I know I’ll be keeping an eye on how it works out. Let me know what you think about the process.

Cambrian House (drôle de nom) est un “incubateur virtuel” facilitant la création d’entreprises en utilisant le “crowdsourcing”, qui pourrait se traduire par “approvisionnement par la foule”. Ce nouveau principe d’organisation du travail se base sur 5 constatations:

1. La foule est dispersée ;
2. La foule a peu de temps à vous accorder ;
3. La foule est pleine de spécialistes ;
4. La foule produit la plupart du temps de la merde ;
5. Mais elle sait aussi trouver la solution la plus appropriée.

Dans le cas de Cambrian House, cela se contrétise ainsi :

1. vous avez une idée
2. vous publiez cette idée sur le site
3. les utilisateurs notent cette idée
4. si votre idée dépasse un seuil de bonnes notes, elle est approuvée
5. l’incubateur propose alors une prime pour que la communauté des développeurs la concrétise
6. une fois votre idée transformée en logiciel ou en service en ligne, l’incubateur se charge de la commercialiser
7. les revenus générés sont alors redistribués entre tous les intervenants

Je me suis évidemment empressé d’y proposer mes “business ideas” qui n’ont pas reçu un excellent soutien (c’est normal, j’ai commencé par les idées auxquelles je ne crois pas trop non plus…) mais ça m’a permis de faire quelques constatations:

1. la foule est impitoyable. Comme on ne se connait pas, les réactions sont franches et directes alors que dans un cours de business ou une rencontre personnelle, on est tenu à un peu de psychologie diplomatique pour dire à quelqu’un que son projet ne vaut rien…
2. Cambrian house a l’air d’héberger beaucoup de NTs (inventeurs) et peu de SJs (managers) ce qui fait que le site croule sous les idées mais on ne voit pas bien qui va les réaliser…

Je vous tiendrai au courant de la suite…
Références:

• “Start-up + Crowdsourcing = Cambrian House” sur le blog de Fred Cavazza
• La montée du “crowdsourcing” par Hubert Guillaud sur InterActu

I finally submitted an idea at Cambrian House and let me tell you…it’s kind of addicting. I submitted my Brown Thumbs idea (though someone please help me find another name for it) and I’m starting to refine it. But what’s more…I’m hungry for Glory Points!!!

I need a few good people to help me in my business. Won’t you help me? Please?

Prezzle, a crowdsourced project from Cambrian House, has paid it’s first royalties!

I am now the proud owner of 4 royalty points or a 0.27% share of the project. It seems like all I have to do now sit back and let the money roll in.

Interested? Join Cambrian House, or send a free New Year Prezzle.

Romantic desitination vacation comparison and Travel Agents in one.

Couples rate romantic holidays they have been on and leave comments about the places they have been. However, the site its self then allows other couples book that exact holiday to the same destination through the website.

Website can act like a package tour operator, and take a small booking fee per holiday.

The romantic side has been emphasised in this idea because I reckon thats where the money is: How many times have you wanted to take your significant other away to a romantic destination but not really known where to start? Or got there and thought “well this is crud, not romatic at all!”

Insure My Ass: Insured by the crowds

Crowd Insurance online: a cross between an insurance companies products and prosper.

Prospective insuree’s request an insurance amount, category and cover statement (what it covers, where, how much cover etc) and the amount they can afford to pay for that insurance cover. Whoever has some spare cash donates this into a “fund” which covers the insuree for that period of time (say a year). The insuree then pays a premium for the insurance (a percentage of the total fund, plus interest) directly to the insurers. There could be pre-set “policies” for different types of insurance with different clauses, if a personally set insurance policy is too complicated.

If the insurance period of time expires, the policy expires and can either be renewed by the insuree or is refunded to the insurers.

IF whatever happens that is covered by the insurance happens, then the user receives an amount from the fund to cover the expensive of whatever requires insurance.

It works for loans, why not insurance?

Detailed example:

User A needs Medical Insurance, and can pay $300 a month for it. He can probably stretch to $350, and reckons he requires about $20,000 of insurance for the year. A ready reckoner can determine these values for him, based on his age, sex and a general health survey. He submits his request to the website after this brief screening, entering his details such as social security and address.

Users B, C, D, E, F and G have spare cash. User B has $7000, user C and D has $2000 and Users E and F and G each have $3,000 each. They put forward the funds into a “pot” which is reserved for the medical insurance of User A. User A now pays the $300 directly to users B … G each month, which is split between them like this:

• User B: 35%
• Users C and D: 10%
• Remaining users: 15%

Obviously some form of interest rate needs to be included on the rate of the borrowing. Lets say 4%? This is 4% of the money in the pot, and the $300 does not include this interest already. So user A is now being charged 300 + (4% of 20000 / 12) = $366.67 per month.

That means that each user is receiving:

User B: $128.33 per month

Users C and D: $36.67 per month

Remaining Users: $55.00 per month

If user A has an accident an amount of insurance is removed from the pot to pay for the medical expenses. If the policy is cancelled, users B .. G receive their money back from the pot (which is ace for them).

Obviously this is just a basic example, and various policies can be worked out for various scenarios. I am not in insurance and do not understand all the ins and outs so feel free to amend my models

Disk File Forest

An application that uses 3D populations of trees that represent the percentage of disk space used.

Its a visually pleasing way to see how much space you have left, and can also double as a disk management tool: forest management can help group more frequently used filegroups together. Forestation can be moved in clumps and groups and positioned closed or further away from other forests.

Defragmentation of the forest can give you a fun way to keep your filestore defragged. It could be a visual aid to how your files are stored, and a good way to help you keep your disk defragged and How Well it is Defragmented in a visual manner. (I and many others defragment their disks most of the time, but others do not. A well defragmented machine can mean a faster machine.)

This would be excellent on something like vista where a 3D version on the desktop can be managed in a “black and white” way.

But the idea doesn’t end there:

• Chop down forests to delete files: store them in the wood shed (recycling bin) or put them through the logmill to delete them.
• Move files in groups by grabbing clumps of trees into new areas (folders)
• Relate trees to other trees by different types of “wood” (hardwoods, soft woods etc) e.g mp3s can be softwoods, work files hardwoods.
• Old files loose their leaves: what files are really old.
• App files are stuck together and cannot be moved separately by location. Unused app files wither and die, looking like blackened and unused tree skeletons
• Document Tree Files that are used often florish and grow bigger and stronger.
• Rendered images of the forest can be used as background images
• In Vista the app can actually BE on the desktop?

I agree the visualisation of something like this is hard to imagine. I am working on a concept visualisation in my head as we speak but nothing makes sense yet. Any ideas are welcome.

The Marketing Place: Online marketing ideas for products.

The ideas for products and services need brandnames and marketing ideas. This would be a website where the marketing of products, brand identity and so on would be opened up to the power of the crowds.

Companies would submit their un-branded products to the website (or produce that needs RE-branding!), upon which the crowd would submit their ideas, story boards, brandnames, logos and copy on the marketing of the product/service. The best one, or the most popular idea as far as the community and the company are concerned wins, and get a slice of the revenue of the product/service.

Basically an example of this would be the popular sweet “Smarties”. Say smarties needed a new product image. They could tender out their requests on this site. Requirements and specifications for the marketing could be broken down for users, and be posted for users to fulfil on the site. Users would submit (with the use of tools) concept art, site design , story boards and graphic work. The crowd would vote on the best for each requirement (althought the company could have final say in the matter). The winner for each section gets the comission for the peice of work required/Royalties/payed for their contribution.

Further to another idea on CH about the “International Bank of the Internet“, I thought my older and similar idea Co-operatively owned Internet Banking idea needed further explanation. Clearly it is a popular thought, and although there’s online lending in the form of Prosper — it’s the furthering of the co-operative BANK experience we need to have.

First off the blurb from my idea-explorer goes something like this:

Think Paypal, but funded and owned by YOU. Get users to deposit an amount their accounts which funds other activities such as loans, investments and mortgages. Users can own accounts in different currencies and invest in high or low risk schemes. I.E This works in a similar way to a normal bank – the only difference is that the Bank its self is actually owned and operated by the users. They say which quotdirectionquot the bank will go in, e.g which funds the bank invests in etc etc. and get the profits of the bank shared between them in addition to interest payments.

In other words, this is more than loans and more than paypal. The bank decides on investment opportunities as well as lending and borrowing products. Even morgages can be obtained here. Every product from ISA’s to Bonds can be offered, and the users reap the benefits of profits made by the bank. All you have to have is a bank account with them to share in the profits.

I want in on this idea, and I want it to happen. Help me make it by voting for my idea

Each subsequent post after this one will expand upon the ideas I alread have in Cambrian House. However here are a list of links to my ideas so far, just so I can shamelessly plug link them all:

The Online Toy Factory

Desktop Creatures (the inspiration behind GWABS)

An Online Lottery

CrowdSource TV

MakeMyLunch

Co-operatively Owned Online Bank

Hi

This is my blog for my Cambrian House Ideas; a place where I expand upon ideas that have limited space in Idea Explorer. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, visit Cambrian House now and find out what all the fuss is about.

If you don’t know who I am, check out my profile on CH. I am the co-ideaman behind GWABS the desktop to desktop battler and avid Java Developer. I write software for Victor Chandler and am a veritable fountain of crap ideas. Please, come with me and swim in the detritus of my mind and help me hone my ideas as they sprout forth from my head bottom.

The introduction for the original Wired article about crowdsourcing reads:
“Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.”

There are three important words in that title: outsourcing, jobs and labor. Each of these words implies that work will be rewarded financially.

If the whole premise of crowdsourcing were to be based on the premise of payment, then discussions of ‘what is crowdsourcing’ would be simple.

Digg would be nothing without it’s an active user community, but it does not pay them so it is not crowdsourcing. Wikipedia relies on volunteers to contribute content but does not pay them so it is not crowdsourcing. Amazon encourages users to write reviews of books but does not pay for them, so it is not crowdsourcing. Nowpublic.com relies on it’s user community to post news stories but does not pay them for contributions, so is not crowdsourcing. All these are examples of great user communities but they are not examples of crowdsourcing.

Mechanical Turk exists to link workers to work and pay them for it. The principle behind the site is to allow someone to post a task which they need someone else to complete. This can be because specialist knowledge is required or because it’s tedious job that someone else will be willing to do for pennies.

Cambrian House is asking for ideas for software that they can produce and sell. They ask the crowd to submit ideas, they ask the crowd to vote on the ideas and they ask the crowd to contribute work towards designing and building the final product. If you are involved in the project you get a royalty payment based on the success of the product.

iStockphoto allows you to upload your artwork, photos and videos so that others can browse and buy your work. Selling uploaded work wasn’t an after thought, it’s why the site was designed – to connect those looking for stock artwork and those looking to sell it.

Threadless is a t-shirt site that only sells designs contributed by users. Designs are uploaded and voted on with winning designs being put into production. The beauty of this being that you know a design is going to sell because the users on the site are also your customers.

The term crowdsourcing may not be around for very long if it’s definition continues to be watered down, or is it time to redefine the term?

This article was prompted by comments at Horse Pig Cow and further discussion at Billions with Zero Knowledge.

The finalists in the first ever Cambrian House Idea Warz Golden Hammer Tournament – and they deserve an award just for surviving a competition with that name(!) – are Film Funder and Spoil My Spouse, both of which looked like very strong contenders from the start.

The winner of the long named contest is going to be announced at the Web2.0 Conference in San Francisco on November 7. So there’s a few more weeks to wait. I wonder if Guy Kawasaki will be passing on the white laptop at the conference.

If you want be one of the contenders in the next lengthy titled competition, sign up at Cambrian House and submit your idea.

I’ve had the honour of being nominated for a seat on the Cambrian House Council.

What is it?

The Council was created to support and represent community members who have questions, feedback, or grievances that need addressing within the Cambrian House community.

And who is it?

The Council will consist of five people. Two will be Cambrian House representatives, and three will be independent community members. Community members will be voted in, and serve fixed terms (typically six months).

Any why should you include me in your voting?

Each member of Cambrian House (join here) has 3 votes to cast for the independent community members. If I was selected for The Council I would continue to report on the events surrounding Cambrian House with the impartiality I have maintained this far. I think the whole ethos behind Cambrian House is inspiring and as an active member of this community I have as much interest in making it work as anyone else.

Read previous comments on Cambrian House and Vote for The Council. A vote for ctrlaltphillipe is vote well cast.

Both MyDreamApp and Cambrian House Idea Warz have voting closing tonight. It will be interesting to see which of these sites will produce either the most interesting or best selling product. On MyDreamApp they have a panel of judges including Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose who are both dismissing interesting products and voting for run of the mill ideas.

The influence of popular judges on MyDreamApp may skew the voting in this round but unfortunately none of the finalists are looking like creating a ground breaking products as offered. In fact, the top two ideas right now are a live weather desktop and a cookbook.

Conversely over at Idea Warz you can still vote for Spoil-A-Spouse and a Time Machine.

The reincarnation of IdeaWarz has new home at ideawarz.com.

As has been widely discussed it also has a new tournament structure. The first round of which finishes at the end of October. There are sixteen contenders in this round of the tournament, all of which are paired off so that two are competing against each other, with eight embarking on a journey to Tournament Isle.

Watch the video introducing the contenders, featuring music as contributed by cybercerberus.

Aidan has already voted. Have you?

The Gwabs project at Cambrian House is looking for contributors with the following skills:

• C#/.net developers
• Copywriters
• Graphic artists/designers

There is now a blog over at Gwabs.com. It looks as though it will be an inside view on the design and development of Gwabs including:

• Character and weapon sketches
• Game design notes
• Progress updates
• Playtest invitations and reports

Another Cambrian House product has passed it’s market test which means that Gwabs is go!

I think there will be a great deal of interest in this project for 3 reasons:

• It’s a cool neat idea.
• It’s the first Cambrian House project that most people will have seen grow from idea to market test to release.
• There is a similar idea being developed by the My Dream App project.

I asked Aidan, the Gwabs team lead, a few extra questions:

How much of a success was the market test for Gwabs? How did you measure it?

That’s a tough question to answer. It’s a combination of traffic flow, pre-orders, uniqueness of the idea and passion within the community and at Cambrian House. And a little secret sauce.

Any info on the secret sauce?

The secret sauce is, naturally, secret. If I told you, someone is bound to kill us both.

Can you give numbers of pre-orders?

Nope. I might tell you if you can get ten people to buy it tho That’ll even earn you some Gwablets to spend on your character when it’s released.

Is it going to be released in October?

Probably November.

When will the first demo version be released!?

When it’s ready. Sorry I can’t be more specific. We’ll need play-testers soon enough, to help ensure game balance.

There are already a few tasks available offering Glory Points. These include translating the Gwabs site and helping promote it. But there also some product development tasks:

1-3 GPs for ideas for weapons and power moves – send in a name, description, even a sketch, and explain how it might be used. More GPs will be given for unique and interesting weapons and moves. Pick your favourite 1 and 1 combat game move and then add Gwabs style Anything that makes it into the game will get additional GPs.

1-5 GPs for ideas for characters – names, descriptions, sketches, histories. Make sure and keep in line with the feel for the game. We’ll be posting RP tasks for the actual graphics tasks (i.e. animated sprites we can use in our game), but this is a pre-cursor to that. Anything we use in the game will get an additional GP award.

So there’s plenty of work to be done before we get our hands on Gwabs. In the meantime, why not watch the trailer, pre-order the game, digg Gwabs and get involved.

There is a great interview with Michael Sikorsky over at Tech Digest.

“We share the rewards, but also share the risk,” says Sikorsky. “If a project does well, people will be phenomenally overpaid, but if it doesn’t do well, they’ll be phenomenally underpaid!”

There is a great plug for Gwabs and Big Hal, as as new project Robin Hood Fund:

“People post any wish they want, and it costs $5 to do it,” says Sikorsky. “$3-4 of that goes to a central fund, while the rest goes towards running the fund. And people vote on whether you should receive your wish, and every week we go through who has the most votes, and what’s in the fund, and pay as many people as we can.”

I was only joking when I suggested that Guy Kawasaki would receive 1000 pizzas from Cambrian House as a treat for be inducted in the NVA. They didn’t, but they have presented him with a laptop, which they are not letting him keep.

The white laptop will be signed by Guy and then passed onto other members of the tech elite before finally being auctioned off on Ebay with the proceeds going to the Youth For Technology Foundation. Follow the progress of The White Laptop.