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!” →

Charities have been a topic of discussion for some time, as people are unsure of whether or not the money will actually end up where it is supposed to. A number of credible charities have been shown to really make a difference, and people have been eager to give them a substantial amount of money. For people that do not have a lot of money to spend but still want to feel like they make a difference there is a website called goededoelshop.

By using this website people can make purchases on websites and a portion of the price will be donated to the charity of your choosing. Normally the webhost will retain this portion (which is also called affiliate marketing) but through the collaboration with this website they have agreed to relinguish it to these charities. The Goededoelshop is obligated to hand over a minimum of 80% to these charities, the rest of which is used to cover the costs of the website and compensate those maintaining it.

Continue reading Giving back through consuming →

Table 1 shows the prices we would have paid for the following one-way trips if we made them a few years age. However nowadays, it is possible to do the same trips for much cheaper prices (table 1). Why? Because since 2006 there is a new company called BlaBlaCar that allows traveling at very low costs, by using the empty seats in the cars of people, who are doing the same trip with their car. In exchange of taking passengers, the driver gets paid to cover the travel costs.

BlaBlaCar is present in 12 European countries and it is continuing to expand. The company has a 100% growth rate/y over the last 4 years, more than 1 million passengers travelling by using this company every month, the estimated costs savings are about €100 millions every year for all the drivers that are registered on their website. By founding the company, Frédéric MAZZELLA did not only seek for profit; one of his main concerns was to find a way to reduce pollution. Thanks to BlaBlaCar, the average occupancy rate of the cars that belong to the members of BlaBlaCar is around 3 vs 1,6 for the European average level. In consequence, it reduced the CO2 emissions by 700 000 tons.

Continue reading BlaBlaCar or how to travel for cheap →