Australia’s continued rise as a global hub for crowdsourcing

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Over just the last few years, Australia has established itself as a global hub for crowdsourcing platforms. Early last year I wrote about the phenomenon, pointing to leading service marketplace Freelancer.com, which is now based out of Sydney (see my interview of its CEO Matt Barrie on Channel 7 last week), 99designs, which recently raised $35 million as the top graphic design competition platform in the world, and DesignCrowd, another top player in the space. I followed up with a post about the innovative ideas broker Ideas While You Sleep.

Now late last week, further news pointing to Australia’s rise as a global crowdsourcing hub. DesignCrowd has raised $3 million to grow the business globally, including shortly hiring 10 new people. CEO Alec Lynch says:
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The potential in a networked world to be more ourselves, towards perfection or destruction

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A nice video titled On the Brink of a Networked Society, shown below, has just been launched by Ericsson. It includes a series of excellent interviews exploring some of the many implications and directions of a connected world, including health, industry structure, how we socialize, and far more. It’s well worth watching.

The single quote in the video that struck me the most was:
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Siri and the dawn of the era of intelligent agents

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I have recently done a number of interviews on the implications of Apple’s voice assistant Siri. To me, it’s looking very much like Apple has once again brought a technology to market precisely when it is sufficiently mature to impress. Voice control and ‘intelligent assistants’ are far from new, but haven’t been widely used to date simply because they haven’t been good enough.

The launch of Siri a year after the company was acquired by Apple has allowed them to develop what was already excellent technology to the point of being ready for the mass market. As with a number of other Apple releases over the last years, Siri’s launch is changing people’s perceptions of what technology can do, and opening many minds to new possibilities. We always knew we would eventually be able to tell our machines what we wanted them to do and have them respond. That era has begun. Though of course it still has a long way to go.

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald features is a nice article titled Siri: can you help make my company better?. It runs through some interesting insights on the state of predictive modelling, and closes with some quotes from me:
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The secrets of BigCommerce’s success

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In the Kochie’s Business Builders program that I hosted on Sunday, I interviewed Matt Barrie of Freelancer.com, and Eddie Machaalani and Mitch Harper of BigCommerce, both fantastic Australian online business success stories.

Following the excellent Freelancer.com interview, below is the interview with BigCommerce’s founders. They recently raised US$15 million from US VC firm General Catalyst Partners in their first external funding round since they were founded.

The interview brings out the reasons for their success: great products and an intense focus on marketing. Their story offers great lessons for any online business.

Here are a few of the insights they shared in the interview:
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Six thoughts on the Klout scoring changes

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Today influence ratings service Klout significantly changed its rankings. Last week Klout CEO Joe Fernandez announced there would be changes, saying “a majority of users will see their scores stay the same or go up but some users will see a drop”. It seems that was not correct, and rankings levels have been revised such that most people’s scores go down. The results appears to be plenty of unhappy people.

Before I offer a few thoughts on this, it’s worth addressing those who say they couldn’t care less about their Klout score. It is absolutely fine, and quite possibly the most appropriate response, not to care a jot what number a service happens to attribute to your influence.

I’ve written extensively on this blog about influence and influence networks over the last six years, and in fact our Future of Influence Summit 2009 had Klout CEO Joe Fernandez and other luminaries of the emerging influence space speak on the business models for influence and reputation panel.

The reason is that, like it or not, the measurement of influence and reputation is one of the most important changes we are seeing in society. We see the ‘reputation economy’ as one of the ExaTrends of the decade.

In a world in which influence has become completely democratized, having measures of influence and reputation will drive many facets of society. Of course, the validity of the influence measures we use is a different matter, but an increasingly important one.

Here are a few quick thoughts on the changes:
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Book research: Looking for case studies/ leading practice in using crowdsourcing

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I am in the final stages of completing a book on how to use crowds and crowdsourcing effectively, which I am co-authoring with Steve Bynghall.

We are using brief case studies liberally through the book, however we need a few more to flesh it out.

We’d love to hear from you if you have been using crowdsourcing tools or approaches extensively enough to have learned useful lessons, and believe you have valuable insights to share from your experience.

To offer your case study or experience, please use the contact form on crowdsourcingresults.com. Please let us know very briefly:
– what you have learned
– what you have found most useful in your use of crowdsourcing tools
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The global state of the mobile industry

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Mary Meeker, formerly of Morgan Stanley and now of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, continues to do her annual presentation at Web 2.0 Summit, providing an unparalleled compilation of research about the global internet industry.

There is a lot to digest in the 65 slides of the presentation, so I thought it was worth pulling out some of the more interesting ones on mobile. Below is the full presentation, plus six charts giving insights into the state of the global mobile industry.

KPCB Internet Trends (2011)
Here are the 7 selected charts with brief commentary:
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Using social media to track and drive organizational success metrics

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This week I was MC for the AHRI HR Technology conference, and ran one of the workshops on the following day, on Creating Results Using Social Media.

A real highlight of the conference was the Social Media: Risks and Rewards panel, which I chaired, with the participation of a fantastic cast of Peter Williams of Deloitte, Steve Barham of LinkedIn, Laurel Papworth of The Community Crew, and Sam Mutimer of ThinkTank Media.

It was a fabulous discussion, and we covered a lot of territory in the conversation.

One of the many topics discussed was the use of social media to track metrics and correlate these with organizational success metrics.
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Animated excursions into the future: the extraordinary implications of utility fog

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I caught up with fellow futurist Kristin Alford last week, yet another first time face-to-face meeting after a long time interacting online. It seems most of the people I meet these days are people I know from Twitter.

Kristin pointed me to some of what her company Bridge8 is doing in creating animated videos about the future. I believe the primary intended audience is secondary school students, but they are excellent videos, well-paced, well-thought-out, educational, all in all very nicely done.

Here is their video on the implications of Utility Fog, starting with a segment on how to think about the future, introducing the idea of utility fog, and running through some of the possible implications. It’s a great study in futures thinking, and well worth watching.


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The Question: What is the most interesting thing you came across today?

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Twitter has moved from asking ‘what are you doing now?’ to ‘what’s happening?’, and now describes itself as an ‘information network‘.

The Twitter News Network is a manifestation of the global brain, in which we create value for others by contributing to the visibility and availability of high-value information.

While many contribute nothing of value to Twitter, many extraordinarily talented and interesting contributors are doing what they can to add value to others. It is a choice we make, by how we engage in our social networks.

If we consider what we can best contrbute to global consciousness, it is very likely the most interesting things we come across. The most intriguing, through-provoking, stimulating ideas, whether they be in the form of an article, a video, a conversation, or anything else from the vastness of media and ideas we encounter each day.
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