Infosys 338 - Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing

Utest

This website is a place where businesses go to develop and increase the quality and efficiency of their mobile app through 'in-the-wild' software testing. App quality increase, time to market decreases and testing costs reduce. Some well-known such as Netflix, USA Today, Google, Microsoft and Amazon and Bills Guard use the utest software. The site uses a form of crowdfunding which is where individuals and businesses can donate money to the company. Utest, soon to be called Applause, has received over $80 million in funding so far.

Ponoko

This website is a software platform that can create downloadable products. You can make, share, sell and buy the product designs. It gives individuals the chance to have unique designs that can express themselves. This site uses co-creation as a form of crowdsourcing, which is where the users upload their own designs and can get it created.

Flickr

Flickr is a photo management and sharing application. It is a form of collaboration in that you can allow your peers or others permission to edit and organise your photos. It has the option of creating a blog that can be kept private or public, which allows the users to choose which option suits them. Anyone who the user is connected to or allows to view their blog, can comment, add notes and tags.

Chaordix

This website is a crowdsourcing platform. It can range from a small group of individuals, to millions of community members around the world. It can create diverse functional groups to a common collaborative space. It can allow for brand and product innovation through customer's ideas and feedback which is useful in that businesses can get the information directly from their customers, who are essentially the users. It can also give organisations a chance to connect and collaborate with their stakeholders.

Smartling

This website is a powerful software solution for managing translation and localization projects. It is a place where businesses can make their all their digital content in their global websites, mobile apps and business documents into multilingual. This is highly beneficial as it in turn increases a businesses revenue, downloads and willingness to buy the businesses products.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

This website is a popular crowdsourcing platform used by businesses. It gives businesses and developers access on demand and gives a scalable workforce. It is a community where it workers can choose from numerous tasks that suits them, and work on convenience - choose hours, work from home, get paid.

Collaboration Tools

Collaborative Tools for Group Project

Today in our lab, we have to analysis a collaboration tool that would be beneficial in our group project. The collaborative tool of Google Drive will be used in our group project.

Google Drive

What type of tool and what is it supposed to do?

This is a collaborative tool that allows each member of the group to share files and it allows each person to edit in real time. During the real time editing, any number of group members can edit the document while everyone can observe the changes being made by the use of cloud sharing. Their is also chatting tool abilities that allows the group members to chat in real time which is useful as we can discuss relevant ideas about the group project. There is a large storage base within the Google Drive which allows us to upload large files.

Human Interaction Factor

The human interaction is the ability for each group member to view and edit the documents in real time as well as chat amongst each other. This tool will be very helpful throughout the duration of our project as we can discuss ideas and add/delete/edit ideas as needed. We can keep up to date on our progress, and have virtual meetings to see how everyone is doing.

Collaboration tools is beneficial in any group projects and it also reduces costs such as money and time in the sense that we can meet online instead of having to constantly meet face-to-face, which reduces any petrol or bus money costs as well as time wasted thinking about ideas or going off topic.

Second Life Blog

In our lab today, we are exploring the virtual world of Second Life. Second Life begins with creating an avatar of your choice to express yourself, and thereafter you can enter different destinations. The destinations are formed into different categories such as "what's hot", "beaches" and "clubs", each suited to fit each avatars style. Within each of these destinations you can interact with other avatars in the same destination and do different activities.

Above, is a screenshot of a club destination called blackhearts café and London city destination where other avatars are dancing together and chatting. A lot of the avatars use Second Life as an online dating medium. The content said between avatars is not filtered and could be offensive to some individuals. The graphics are very realistiI personally find this software very "laggy" and therefore can be frustrating at times. I would not intend on using Second Life regularly, as it is not of interest to me, although it is entertaining to browse and understand the idea of this virtual world.