Web 2.0 Service: Crowdsourcing Task Connection

While social networks and content-based communities churn out marketable material for free, some company has got to be scratching their heads. I'm going to sound like a money-fueled corporate sellout, but it's fact that people have an incentive of showing their individuality to add to these communities and that companies, very subtly, sell it right back to the masses. Look at threadless - they got the community designing every shirt, they print it and peddles it right back to them. (I'm not bashing threadless, I love them for creating a method for designers to get their designs produced.) There stands this gap for all the remaining products (besides t-shirt and hoodie designs) for somebody to connect the dots. The company need and the community solution can work hand-in-hand to increase quality and awareness. If implemented correctly, a large community may prove better than a set number of hired workers in terms of quality, efficiency and cost.

A middleman company would be great to meet the needs here. The key is to create communities, contests for everything from designing wallpapers to politics, yet retain the creativity, honor, and individuality. Or offer intangible inherent characteristics of companies - fame, fortune, or whatever. This can work in multiple ways - an underground approach and a large streamlined approach. Though it may sound extremely sketchy, an underground approach would work due to the inherent nature of the idea - mask the worth of information to gain a profit, much like how many companies that assemble trend reports operate. (I by no means am trying to vilify this industry - they put an extreme amount of labor into these reports which amounts for the high costs, but many times they receive the information free) A large streamlined approach may receive flak due to a revival in the rebellious stick-it-to-the-man/anti-corporate/individuality movement, but may work well if implemented correctly due to increased interest due to involvement. Furthermore, theoretically-infinite simultaneous task/community solutions can be in process.

Okay, enough lofty ideas, this is what I'm getting at: Motorola says, "I want a product that not only oozes industrial-design sexiness but implements innovative human-factor and has high engineering performance." So Motorola hires Company A. Company A responds by creating a community where Artist A speaks with Engineer B and Psychologist C, whom in the interest of fame and potential job offer, combine their talents to come up with The Product. The difference between this community and just a design contest is not only is judging determined by the public, but every single process of the product cycle has input from the entire community. So after the community kicks it around, and finally decides on a few iterations, Company A takes the final product and packages it with all the process notes, comments, community interactions, and delivers it back to Motorola. Motorola recognizes each member who added input, and gives them an award, adds key members to the product team, and a little compensation monetarily or in new unreleased products. Sales skyrocket due to high quality and high performance and high awareness due to community interaction. Motorola is happy, the Community is happy, and Company A is happy.

So still not morally sound? Well, how about a middleman for non-profit organizations? Design contests for much needed products, writing contests along the journalism vein, community braintrusts for ideals, idea centers for future vision. Same idea, just streamline it into social communities and create subcultures that encourage community service work.

Market: A broad range of people, but specifically college students looking to get ahead in the career market, or high school/junior high students seeking celebrity status on the web, or even the engineer that secretly aspires to be a fashion designer.

Competition: YouTube could easily work with movie studios, and MySpace could easily work with record labels. As mentioned before, Threadless does this well for t-shirts, but there is no product/task-independent system for every single task. Cambrian House creates crowdsourced companies but doesn't work with a specific need of a larger company or organization.

Potential Expansion:
- If a system can be created so that it is general enough to include all tasks/products, possibilities are limitless.
- This could be applied both to general tasks (help plant more trees) or specific problems (design this product with these constraints).
- Partnership with Ning may prove useful since they have a very good understanding of streamlining social networks and have the coding backend.

Other Thoughts:
- Crowdsourcing might just be a temporary trend that is the result of the renewed hipster movement, which encourages individuality through DIY.
- There must always be an even trade between what the community is offering and what the company is offering.

Web 2.0 Service: Multi-Task Manager

New studies are continuously released about how our performance decreases when multitasking (task + email, driving + cellphone). Sometimes, we need someone or something to keep track of our schedule and general information. Adobe Apollo can be simultaneously online and on the desktop, enabling globalization of personal settings. Default settings could be set from a short personal matrix or a global database of typical settings and then be tweaked by the user for preferred arrangement, which could be saved on a server to be accessed at any computer.

Market: A product like this would have a broad market and could be used for practically anything. Companies, schools, and large organizations could utilize this as an individual productivity booster and individuals can use this for their personal lives.

Competition: Traditional organization methods would be the main competition. Cost and ease of use probably would be the main concern.

Potential Expansion:
- Speech-to-text commands and task input (since speech is faster than writing)
- Create a complete company productivity system
- Customized for niche markets

Other Thoughts:
- Many different methods of input are necessary which may prove difficult to streamline. Syncing with particular softwares will have to be updated every time a new device comes out, and handwriting recognition will need to be optimized for writing-to-text recognition.
- Standards might have to be set for emails for assignment and due date if an elaborate analysis algorithm is not written