Can’t decide what book to read next? Are book recommendations from Amazon not useful? Then go to http://www.goodreads.com a free online platform that prides itself in its customized recommendation system to match you with your future favorite book.

Goodreads combined several information systems to create an online platform connecting books (and authors) to readers. Goodreads calls itself a “social cataloging” website, which more or less means it’s an online platform co-created using crowdsourcing to build an extensive catalogue and information search system combined with an intricate algorithm to base its recommendation system on.

The platform started from a mission “to help people find and share books they love… [and] to improve the process of reading and learning throughout the world,” (Goodreads.com). In order to dare to attempt such a lofty dream the founders turned to crowdsourcing, allowing people to join the community for free and upload books and journals. Users are able to make their own profiles, reading lists, start forums, and discussions, and create their own group of book recommendations; attracting over 20 million users, causing the “net-work effect” and a subsequent library of over ten million books and growing(Eisenmann, 2006).

Choice overload! What to choose!? No fear, the website prides itself in its accurate Recommendation Agent (RA) algorithm. When a user signs up the first thing they do is go through active content-filtering by selecting preferences for book genres. The second step is to review/rate 20 books which the RA uses as collaborative filtering to recommend books based on matching criteria using the opinions of “like minded people”(Xiao, et al., 2007).

Continue reading Recommendations better than Oprah or your neighborhood book club →

A common homeowner predicament, Angie found herself in need of in-house repairs but did not know the most reliable contractor. To remedy this situation in 1995 Angie went door-to-door in Columbus, Ohio and collected a list of over 1,000 reviews and ratings of local contractors. Since then “Angie’s List” has grown to provide a include reviews of over 700 different industries, supporting over 2 million users! Now it is an information search website for contract services facilitated through crowd-sourced reviews and ratings, a service platform connecting local business with customers.

In a world with so much information, and especially in the service industry with information asymmetry between companies (experts) and consumers (usually novices), people are looking for less costly ways to be more informed by delegating the information search to the “Wisdom of the Crowd,” (Surowiecki, 2005). Some companies have designed their entire business models around this idea; crowdsourcing and crowdfunding have shown how to “let the crowd get your work done for you- cheap, perfect and now,”(Malone, et. al., 2010). Some companies (Wikipedia) have successfully harnessed and managed collective intelligence to provide platforms of information(Malone, et. al., 2010). But how can anyone be sure that Angie, or any other platform, is providing us with unbiased information?

Continue reading Angie’s List, When to Stop Following the Crowd(sourcing) →

Today many companies provide options to rate products. Some go a step further and turn user ratings into the service they provide. Vivino is an example of an app that does just that. I have used the app for a while now, mainly to keep track of the wine I drink and thereby increasing my extracurricular learning experience. Now I decided to have another look at the app and see with what kind of suggestions it provided me, something the app is also intended for…

How does it work?

It starts by manually adding a wine (although this function is a bit hidden away) or scanning the label of a wine manually. In case of the latter Vivino generally finds the wine you scanned within seconds, you then need to check whether it scanned the right variety/type, as the vineyard is most of the times properly recognized, the various wines per vineyard can sometimes be a bit more of a hassle. In case it is not directly recognized Vivino’s team will manually match it for you. After you scanned a wine you can rate it (using a 5 star rating system, with half star intervals), add public or private notes or update information about the wine manually, such as the grapes, price et cetera. This seems to be a powerful system. As the database now holds over a million wines and more that 4 million people using the app worldwide.

Recommendations
Based on the users ratings the user will receive recommendations for other wines. In the recommendations tab you see an overview of wines, with a note to it as to how many ratings you have in common with a certain person that likes the suggested wine.

Continue reading Viva il vino! Exploring wine with Vivino →

Group buying is not new for online buyers anymore. Sometimes, with certain amount of people buying certain products, online seller will offer discount or eliminate the shipping fees. While the concept of group buying applied on the intangible goods, such as service, the idea of group coupon came up. Sellers, such as restaurants, beauty salons, hotels, exhibitions, trips, will offer certain amount of group coupons in limited time, and consumers will collect money for the coupons. For instance, my friend and I collected ten people in total within a week to get 30% discount for an art exhibition.

Groupon is an online platform gathering all these group coupons. It was found at 2008 in Chicago and soon enlarged its business territory into 49 countries. Groupon offer APP for consumers to update latest discount and download these coupons on phone. With high mobility, Groupon is creating a new marketing strategy. Many startup stores offer coupons to increase customers and fames. Some sellers offer coupons to gain customers in three weeks beforehand, gaining steady amount of customers, while other sellers offer last minute coupons to earn maximum profit.

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Designcrowd.com is a platform where graphic designers can compete with each other for projects posted by individuals or companies. How it works? Pretty easy, business post a briefing with the description of what they want and their budget and hundreds of graphic designers from around the world send them their proposes within days. Then, the company chooses its favorite ones and gives feedback to the designers for minor changes till get the perfect design for its needs. Of course, the company pays the designer and the designer sends all the copyrights and the files to the company. If you don’t find the design you are looking for, the webpage gives you your money back. One of the differences between Designcrowd and its competitors is that Designcrowd pays also for participation to the finalist designs, attracting more designers than any other design crowdsource webpage.  This has made the company grow faster in the last years and even get involved in some acquisitions of other crowd design companies. The platform covers any kind of creative project, from web design to logos.

The system has clear advantages for companies: they have more options to choose from than a traditional graphic design company can offer, it´s possible to benefit from the creative diversity around the world and even cheaper than normal graphic designers.  In the other hand, the system has been criticized for diminishing the quality of the designs, since there’s no certainty of getting paid, artist have less incentive to put extra effort on the designs and prefer to apply to several projects than work hard in one. Another detrimental point is the possibility of recycling ideas for several projects, compromising the singularity of the design. Continue reading Designcrowd: Crowdsource your graphic design projects →

It’s what every socialist dreams of; a society share the stuff they don’t urgently need and receive the stuff they desire without having to spend any money on it. One possible downside to this is the idea that people are not to be trusted and will take advantage of the good nature of others. If there was some forum where people could look for goods to share while at the same time moniter what others have to offer and have an indicator of how trustworthy there were, that would be amazing right? Look no further!

The people Spullendelen have recently created exactly such a platform. You can register the goods you have to share, indicate with whom you want to trade and and what days an interested party could come and pick them up. Clearly value is created through the otherwise neglected goods that might have been useless to one party, but extremely valuable to another.

The guidelines specifiy the rules that are ought to be maintained (clearly specified dates when you will return the item, as well as state of condition it was in when you borrowed it). The website itself distances itself from any conflict arising through the transactions, and lending something out to someone is at your own risk.

One of the means the website aims to use to counter this is to have profiles for users that show how often they lend out and borrowed themselves, as well as the money any person has saved by doing so. You can also add people to your friends and only allow your unused goods to be shown to your friends or people in your own neighborhood.

Continue reading Sharing is caring →

There is something wrong with the information today. First, we suffer from an information overload (1). We can know whatever we want, whenever we prefer. However, in most of the cases, this doesn’t make us more educated, as info touch us just the time to impress. Probably it will be disappeared in a moment of real need. Second and more important, “Information is not knowledge”, at least according to Einstein. Information is the skeleton, knowledge is its human application, colored by creativity, fixed by ad hoc application.

The founders of Jelly, which are Biz Stone -one of the Twitter co founder-, and Ben Finkel, started up from this intuition. Do algorithms really know us? Could friends’ advises be replaced by recommendation agents? Can Wikipedia answer all our questions? They said no. Technology, they thought, does a lot in terms of gathering the worldwide intelligence, but it will never be able to replace human brains. Phew, this is comforting.

So they created Jelly. Jelly is an app and an idea that like a jellyfish uses different tentacles to feed the same brain. Jelly is personalized. Last, Jelly is social.

Continue reading Jelly, “Let’s help each other!” →