Crowdsourcing

I had been told about a new way of doing business by a clinical research assistant attached to an organization based in overseas. It is called crowdsourcing.

It is when a company hires many different kind of freelancers, paid or voluntary to help out in solving some problems using new technology or appliances.

Let us imagine a GPS that everyone are using now to determine a direction to a specific location. In the future, if you have a problem to get from A to B due to traffic jam, you can use social mobile appliances called Cue Waze that updates road situations as you start the car’s engine. This appliance will map your route, identify how long you’ve stopped at the traffic lights or traffic jams.

It can then advice you to get the shortest route possible.

This is an example on how a company is using crowdsourcing to gather data and subsequently built a digital map from individual contribution either from voluntary or paid freelancers. What is needed to validate the information received is to verify those information using  other users who contribute the sama data. Since more people verify the data, it is more likely it will to be correct and reliable.

I suppose we can used FB friends as crowdsourcing users for some of our activities……!