Crowdsourcing is a relatively new term coined by Jeff Howe and it refers to taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community –a crowd. Projects that have been carried out so far have been very successful and prove the great power of the crowd. CrowdsourcingPower has started a business based on this concept, giving any individual the possibility to earn extra money working on a data base.
In this article, I will presnet the ESP Game, which is a brilliant idea and a great example of a successful crowdsourcing project.
The ESP Game was launched in 2004 and it gets people to label images as a side-effect of playing a game. The image labels can be used to improve image search on the Web. The game was created by Luis von Ahn from Carnegie Mellon University. Google bought a license to create its own version of the game in 2006. The Google version is known as Google Image Labeler.
In the ESP game two partners who don’t know each other are paired up and asked to agree on a word that would be an appropriate label for an image that they both see. The two partners cannot communicate. They both enter possible words, and once a word is entered by both partners (not necessarily at the same time), that word is agreed upon and becomes a label for the image. The game encourages the players to assign “obvious” labels, for the two partners to come to an agreement in the shortest possible time.
Having two people play together makes the game more fun and the information obtained accurate. Since the only thing the two partners have in common is that they both see the same image, they must enter reasonable labels to have any chance of agreeing on one.
The game goes on for two and a half minutes, and during this time the players have to label 15 images. There are also prizes given out weekly, such as $20 to $50 gifts, and everybody who gets more than 50,000 points a week can win a prize.
Even if the game is designed in such a way that people have fun, its main purpose is for Google to ensure that its keywords are matched to correct images. Each matched word helps Google build an accurate database used for Google Image Search in order to return better search results.
Image recognition is a task that computers cannot currently complete. Humans are perfectly capable of it, but not necessarily willing. The game made this task look fun, so now, there are people who play the game over 40 hours a week! It’s like they were hired full time to label images! But instead of it being a tedious boring job, they are just playing a game, while also “helping the world become a better place”. (quote from the esp game site:http://www.espgame.org/gwap/about/)
This is a great example of a successful crowdsourcing project that shows how a community or a crowd of people can bring their efforts together to accomplish a huge task and create something useful and of great value.
With the tools that we have available now, in the Internet Age, with groups being able to come together and communicate easier than ever before, it is amazing to see big projects being so easily accomplished.
Crowdsourcing is a model that works great! It’s been proven by so many successful projects. I am sure that more and more business people will apply this concept to various projects and to create successful businesses.
Google, Amazon, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, LEGO, Pepsi, Canada’s Cambrian House, Eli Lilly (Innocentive), Kraft, General Mills, Nike, MasterCard, iStockphoto, Zebo are just a few of the companies that have had successful crowdsourcing projects. CrowdsourcingPower is a new company that gives any individual the opportunity to earn money through a crowdsourcing project.
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