Home swapping as a way to celebrate your summer weeks has been done for many years. Lately this type of vacation has become popular with the crowd. With an increased interest new initiatives arise, just as Behomm. Agusti Juste and Eva Calduch started Behomm a year ago out of dissatisfaction about the traditional home swapping websites. “You spend too much time scanning all the houses and rejecting people that have a completely different lifestyle and home” they said. As graphical designers they wondered why not to set up their own home swapping community JUST for creative people: Behomm was born!
The first 300 members consisted of friends and family of Augusti and Eva who received a lifelong membership in exchange for sending out invitations to their friends. As said only creative people are eligible to receive an invitation, for that reason the website holds a ‘professions list’ that indicates what is understood by this term. All sorts of designers to art museum managers to make up artists are welcome. Only an invitation will lead to access to the website which makes Behomm a private online community. To go even further, Augusti and Eva (try to) meet all new members; having a coffee or diner with potential members, everything to be sure that they fit the community. You can say that Behomm has already become a success. Within a year it reached 702 members in Europe and the Americas.
Yesterday (Tuesday 29th of April) graduated student Frederik Mijnhardt received the Internet Impact Afstudeerprijs (master thesis price) from Google. Google Netherlands decided, for the first time this year, to grant a price to the best master thesis to encourage research on economic effects and possibilities of Internet.
First price went to Mijnhard’s master thesis “Using crowdsourcing for enterprise software localization”. He received out of the hands of Rogier Klimbie, Google’s Policy Manager Benelux, the 5000 euro award winning price.
In his thesis Mijnhardt looked at the possibility of outsourcing work via the internet (crowdsourcing) vs. the tradition outsourcing and hiring of employees. CA Technologies, an international software company, has a translation department at which professional translators from within the company as well as outside the company work. Due to the fact that the workload fluctuates heavily the costs and the time to have a product translated are high. Continue reading We Have a Winner! #InternetImpactAfstudeerprijs→
The Netherlands is known for some of the greatest museums. Institutions that have been present for ages but museums are more than ever struggling; with the technological changes it became more and more difficult to get people to visit museums.
Following the trend of more active customers, museums also engaged customers in their new product processes, with the ‘product’ being a new exhibition, a new outline of the museum, or a new collection bought. In her book ‘The Participatory Museum’, Simon (2009) lays down these different types of co-creation with visitors.
This year the Rijksmuseum took another approach in co-creation. With the renovation, the Rijksmuseum decided to digitalize a great part of her collection. With the re-opening of the museum the website the Rijksstudio was set up. The website holds more than 150,000 works of art (masterpieces to be exact!) that can be ‘liked’, zoomed in on but most of all can be downloaded to be used in your own creations. The entire online collection is available in pin-sharp clarity and copyright-free.
Consumer Value Creation 