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Food tech is now one of the hottest sectors for the tech industry. Over the past 3 years the market has segmented into delivery, specialized pre-made, socialized cooking, amongst others. 

As Marc Andreessen famously wrote: "Software is eating the world"; looks like the world is eating-up software too! 

http://ow.ly/AAAbU 

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What could you buy for $656 B? Check out our infographic about the biggest acquisitions of Q1 and Q2

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Guest Post: Crowdsourcing or User-Supplied Content. Is there a Difference?

Today’s post comes from David Alan Grier, crowdsourcing expert and author of Crowdsourcing for Dummies. He tackles the question of who makes up the crowd. Check out his previous post for Owler.

The quick answer to this question is “No” but such a blunt response obscures a deeper understanding of crowdsourcing and how it is a powerful, general-purpose method for assembling information. It also overlooks the story that generated this question, a story that helps illuminate the power of crowdsourcing.  

About a month ago, I was on a panel for a web-chat about user-defined content. (You can find the log of the chat at  http://ow.ly/z11QR #cmgr). My colleagues were two distinguished experts in mass marketing. We had been bantering about the various ways that user-defined content could be of value. It can help augment users guides and instructions, help to market a product or service, expand and strengthen customer support, and even shape new products and services. In the middle of this discussion, one of the participants asked the key question. “What is the difference between crowdsourcing and user-supplied content?”  

The fact that the question was asked at all suggests that the definition of crowdsourcing is not well understood and that idea of crowdsourcing it still somewhat magical. To crowdsource, you turn to the crowd and something special happens. By contrast, user-supplied content seems easy to grasp. To get user-supplied content, you create an appropriate webpage, describe the kind of content you would like and ask your users to supply it. Simple. Straightforward. Obvious.

Yet, user-supplied content is merely a special case of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is merely a market activity. To crowdsource, you create a market and identify the tasks that you want to have done. These tasks could be to create content, to find information, to modify information that you already have. Members of the crowd come to your market to do work. You review their submissions and reward the ones that are acceptable to you. (If you want to get a slightly longer and more detailed description of crowdsourcing, you can look at my short video introduction to crowdsourcing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l-1jp4H4WE)

In the chat session on user-supplied content, one of my colleagues typed the answer before me but she equivocated. They are similar, she said. She understood how user-supplied content was a form of mass marketing and knew enough to grasp that crowdsourcing has many more ways of gathering information than merely asking a group of people to find answers to your questions. In crowdsourcing, you can divide your work in many different ways and utilize your market to get the most of the expertise that you have. You can put questions to the crowd. You can divide the crowd into teams, and get specific information from each team. You can use one part of the crowd to pose questions and another to answer them. You can qualify part of the crowd, identify them as special experts, and use this group to answer the questions of other.  

Returning to the question that started this posting, we can see that user-supplied content is indeed a form of crowdsourcing. As a form of crowdsourcing, it has many ways of providing information that we can use.  

David Alan Grier

Author, When Computers Were Human, Crowdsourcing for Dummies, and other books.

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Stream on! Check out our latest infographic comparing TV streaming services

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Amazon launches Kindle Unlimited e-book subscription service. In the Ama-zone, you can read forever...

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What a Hoot! Owler Comics

With Microsoft's proposed layoffs, the blue screen of death takes on a whole new meaning. Read more here.

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Germany came out on top in the World Cup... but what about the battle behind-the-scenes? Nike and Adidas face off as World Cup sponsors.

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What a Hoot! Owler Comics

Would you wear a Google watch?

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Guest Post: The Teaming Unwashed Masses

Today’s post comes from David Alan Grier, crowdsourcing expert and author of Crowdsourcing for Dummies. He tackles the question of who makes up the crowd. Check out his previous post for Owler.

When people first discover crowdsourcing, they often react with a mild revulsion, as if they had just encountered the teaming unwashed masses and smelled something highly unpleasant.  Recovering from the encounter, they quickly start raising objections.  The crowd cannot be trusted, they claim.  It contains unreliable people such as hackers, thieves, pathological liars, Nigerian Princes, government spies and teenagers.  We don’t know where they have been and can’t accept the things that they might bring to our project.  

Such an objection is based on a fundamental assumption.  It assumes that crowdsourcing is really nothing more than mob action.  In fact, good crowdsourcing is a carefully managed activity.  It requires us to establish detailed procedures that guide the work of the crowd, as I discussed in my last blog posting.  In addition, it demands that choose the members of our crowd so that we have the skills and the view points that we need.  

The concept of choosing the members of the crowd may seem to be a little odd but it is a fact of life in crowdsourcing.  No serious crowdsourcer would give a job to a group of people that they do not know any more than they would seek marriage advice by going to a busy street corner and asking a passing stranger for their thoughts.  A crowdsourcer may not know all the details about everybody in their crowd but they generally know the kinds of skills that they want in the workforce and they take steps to get those skills in their workers.  

Crowdsourcers usually use three techniques to get the crowds that they want.  These techniques are:

Restricting membership in the crowd to certain kinds of people with specific backgrounds;

Testing potential workers to see if they have the right skills;

Assessing the accomplishments of each worker to see if they are doing things accurately.  

All of these techniques deserve a blog posting to themselves.  Admittedly, none of them will guarantee that any workforce is perfect.  However, they tend to produce a crowd that generally has the skills that you need and capable of producing the results that you want.  When you work with a well-managed crowd, you are not encountering the teaming unwashed masses.  You are engaging a masses, to be sure, but they are masses that have been chosen for you.

David Alan Grier

Fellow IEEE

Author, When Computers Were Human, Crowdsourcing for Dummies, and other books.

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3...2...1... BLAST OFF

Owler just launched our free mobile app in the App Store. Take polls, access a new-and-improved feed, and view company profiles, all on your phone.

We're over the moon about it, and we hope you are too.

Get the app or check out owler.com.

For today's coverage from PC World, click here.

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What a Hoot! Owler Comics

Check please! Priceline is paying $2.6 B for OpenTable. Read more here.

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Turns out word of mouth works better than advertising! Consumers also look to retailers/store visits and YouTube. Thanks to Cannes Lions for the infographic. Read more here.

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What a Hoot! Owler Comics

Sony pwns everyone. Read more here.

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Weekend LifeHack: What You've Been Doing Wrong Every Morning

Leave your inbox alone

It’s 6:30 AM, and you just woke up. You reach over to turn off the alarm on your phone, and while you’re at it, you decide to check your e-mail. You’ve been waiting on an e-mail from one of your coworkers, and who knows, maybe someone even viewed your LinkedIn profile...

Might as well get an early start on your inbox, right? WRONG.

Start your day proactively, not reactively

If you want to have a more productive day, wait at least an hour or so before you check your e-mail. Author Julie Morgenstern emphasizes this in her book “Never Check E-mail in the Morning”. Because e-mail can interrupt your thought process, it keeps you from accomplishing the things that you want to do. Morgenstern also notes that e-mail is reactive, and it’s better to start your day with a proactive activity.

Spend your morning exercising or meditating or relaxing with your family. For more ideas of how to start your day, look here.

Sam Edwards via Getty images

Make your morning stress-free

If you try to respond to everyone right when you wake up, chances are you’ll stress yourself out. Instead of letting your inbox take over, do something to center yourself. When you de-stress your morning, you might just improve your whole day.

Stay tuned for the next Weekend LifeHack

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Happy Father's Day from the Owler team! May your day be filled with family fun and matching sweater vests

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Guest Post: Can We Trust Crowdsourcing?

Today's post comes from David Alan Grier, crowdsourcing expert and author of Crowdsourcing for Dummies. He tackles the question of whether we should trust crowdsourced information. Check out his previous post for Owler.

After they begin to understand the nature of crowdsourcing, most people quickly gravitate towards one question. “Can we trust it?” they ask. “How do we know that crowd just isn’t making things up?” The answer to this question is straightforward, though it points to a longer discussion. You don’t trust crowdsourcing any more than you trust any other form of industrial production. You place your trust in the people who manage crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing is a form of industrial production, just as mass production or flexible manufacture, or craftwork is a form of production. All of these methods are ways of organizing labor, capital, and raw material to produce goods and services. Taken by themselves, none of these methods can guarantee that their output is good, or reliable, or even inexpensive. For example, should you need a concrete reminder of how badly mass production can work, volunteer to teach a senior shop class at a local high school. Few of the students in these classes really master the techniques of production and tend to make a mess of things. Sure, they are following the same kinds of rules that are applied in factories but they don’t yet have the skill to make mass production work well.

If you are going to trust crowdsourcing, you are really going to be trusting the organizations that will be doing crowdsourcing for you. (You might be interested in doing crowdsourcing yourself but you will want to weigh the cost before you do. Like the process of building an assembly line in your back yard or producing fireworks in your basement, the idea of staring your own crowdsourcing operation is more complex than first appears and has dangerous consequences that you might not foresee.) Successful crowdsourcing firms rely on a number of techniques to make sure that their process is efficient, that it is doing what they intend and that the results are reliable.

So when you are using the services of a crowdsourcing organization, how can you tell if they have a good plan for their crowd? I will need more blog entries before I can fully answer that question. If you want to peek ahead, you can always look at Crowdsourcing for Dummies. Many consumers will rely on the signs that we associate with any consumer product: brand, reputation of the firm, outside reviews. We’ll probe these ideas in greater depth in later blog postings. But for the moment, the answer to the question “Can we trust crowdsourcing?” is “No. Instead, we place our trust in the people who are managing the crowdsourcing process.”

David Alan Grier

Author, When Computers Were Human, Crowdsourcing for Dummies, and other books.

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What a Hoot! Owler Comics

With Amazon planning to unveil its smartphone June 18th, do you think Apple has a fierce competitor on its hands?