I live in a house with four other girls, invariably one night in a week is a dedicated movie night where questionable amounts of junk food is bought and the search for the perfect movie elapses the time taken to watch the actual movie. Coming to a consensus about which movie to watch is a far more difficult ordeal that you’d think so we end up putting our fate into the hands of the internet-Rotten Tomatoes. Similar to the ‘Magic 8 ball’, heavy decisions are made with Rotten Tomatoes.
The platform basically combines critic’s reviews and user rating across various websites and presents the final rating of a movie as a percentile. If the movie is higher than a 60% percentile, it is considered ‘fresh’, if not then it’s ‘rotten’. As much as my housemates and a million other people swear by it, I have a bone to pick with the website. The platform compiles reviews and is considered an aggregator yet movies that completely suck, in the real sense, Captain America 2011 for instance are giving a whopping 79% rating. The movie did miserably at the box office and was not well received by audiences at large. So where does this compilation come from? Who are their audiences? Despite high ratings, comments say completely different things. And this movie isn’t the only example!
Most of us are part of the Instagram bandwagon; guilty of filling up our friends feeds with pictures of our cats, sunsets, selfies and of every meal we eat with an excess use of filters. Then comes along VSCO Cam, made for professional photographers in mind. The app is now in android and iOS and is called a photo-publishing platform unlike its counterpart. VSCO Cam puts the art of photography above the social aspect of the app and still man to penetrate a large market beyond just professional photographers. The creators of the app, a couple from the design industry, are creative in the true sense of the word more focused on the art of photography than building marketing phenomena around their product. The mobile platform offers a range of free presets and editing tools for their user that emulates mobile photos into film quality and offer advanced editing tools for different prices. The app itself is beautifully designed whilst being user-friendly and having an ultra sleek interface.
In many ways, VSCO Grid is an anti-social social network. You can’t leave comments, you can’t click a heart icon or “like” something. What you can do is follow photographers whose work you admire. Discovery is curated, not automated. VSCO Cam doesn’t shy away from the social perspective entirely though ensuring that users can create a grid of their photos and share it on Twitter, Facebook as well as Instagram. What is interesting to note is that when a photos edited using VSCO is shared, #vscocam is automatically added making sure the world knows who is responsible for the film quality of a digital photo. VSCO Cam goes beyond just creating and selling editing products on the platform but enables users to create a ‘journal’.It’s a stunning, visual blog that’s been carefully curated by the VSCO team to showcase how a variety of photographers from all over the world use their tools. Continue reading #vscocam→
Crowdsourcing has been a tool for companies since the 18th century to involve their customers in creating greater value. Whether it has been in creating a logo, or designing a product or developing a business plan, firms across the world have used the crowdsourcing phenomena to their advantage. But it’s not just the firms; it’s in politics as well.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) directly translating to the Party of the Common Man that is currently contesting in the current ongoing elections in India is the world’s first completely crowd sourced political movement. AAP was initially never a political party but was the lead of a social movement to end corruption in India in 2011. Continue reading Crowdsourcing & Politics→
Consumer Value Creation 