Resources

The following are websites for different areas of crowdsourcing to check out.

Crowdsourced Service Providers and Agencies

 blur Group (blurgroup.com) A full-service, integrated creative agency that leverages crowdsourcing to enhance creative thinking and augment creative output.

Chaordix (chaordix.com) Provides planning and outcome assessment, crowd recruitment, community management, and an online platform and tools for collaborative innovation, market research, and brand management.

Clickadvisor (clickadvisor.com) An online consumer-research agency specializing in co-creation and innovation for consumer brands using consumer crowds.

GeniusRocket (geniusrocket.com) Offers curated crowdsourcing to create rich media content, branding, and naming for companies through an online crowdsourcing platform.

Poptent (poptent.net) A social network that produces crowdsourced videos for both online and offline use.

Spigit (spigit.com) Provides software to companies for innovation and “collective idea management,” both internally with employees and externally with customers and business partners.

Tongal (tongal.com) Crowdsources collaboration for creative work including video production, helping businesses transform their core consumers into creators.

Whinot (whinot.com) Offers small-business consulting services and marketing services by bringing together a community of skilled consultants.

Answer Sites

Aardvark (vark.com) A peer-to-peer answer site that uses both e-mail and instant messaging to distribute questions and disseminate answers.

Answerbag (answerbag.com) A general topic answer site open to the public. Requires that individuals set up a free account.

Answers.com (answers.com) A highly trafficked site that gives you the option of getting answers from web-based reference sites or their Wikianswers online community.

ChaCha (chacha.com) Pays guides to answer questions via text messaging and phone.

Facebook Questions (facebook.com/questions) Facebook’s version of public and peer-to-peer questions and answers.

LinkedIn Answers (linkedin.com/answers) LinkedIn’s version of peer-to-peer and public questions and answers, with an emphasis on answers from your own connections.

Mahalo Answers (mahalo.com/answers) Crowd answer site that pays responders in virtual currency (Mahalo Dollars) that can be converted into real currency.

Quora (quora.com) A newer entry into the answer site space, founded by a former Facebook employee. The site is growing rapidly, partly due to its powerful, integrated technology platform but also the high-profile tech industry crowd it has attracted from the start.

WikiAnswers (wiki.answers.com) The online answer community for Answers.com.

Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com) Crowd answer site owned by Yahoo!

Co-Creation and Customer Participation

Products

Blank Label (blank-label.com) A site where customers can design their own dress shirts for men.

Chocri (createmychocolate.com) A site where customers can select ingredients— from dried strawberries to bacon bits to gold flakes—to add to chocolate bars that they can then purchase.

Design a Tea (designatea.com) A site where customers can pick a base tea and add their favorite flavors to create a custom blend.

FashionPlaytes (fashionplaytes.com) Girls select from different design elements to customize clothing that they—or their parents—can buy.

Furniture4Home (furniture4home.net) Customers vote on new products on the website, before they are manufactured.

Made.com (made.com) A site where customers vote on new products on the website before they are manufactured.

ModCloth (modcloth.com) Customers pre-order and fund up-and-coming designers’ collections, putting the consumer in the role of “fashion buyer.”

Threadless (threadless.com) An online community that designs t-shirts, votes for favorites, and purchases the produced t-shirts.

Crowd Action and Activism

Bristol Rising (bristolrising.com) The crowdsourcing civic project of Bristol, Connecticut, where residents are suggesting city projects for an undeveloped former shopping mall site.

Citizen Effect (citizeneffect.org) Provides individuals with tools and networks to work with communities around the world to make a positive impact through crowdfunding.

CrowdVoice (crowdvoice.org) A user-powered service that crowdsources information about protests happening around the world.

Give a Minute (giveaminute.info) A site that empowers city residents in Chicago and Memphis to post ideas for city improvements. The site shows plans of expanding to New York City and San Jose.

One Billion Minds (onebillionminds.com) An online network and platform that mobilizes individuals to create social impact in emerging countries.

SeeClickFix (seeclickfix.com) Encourages citizens to report concerns about their neighborhoods using the web, mobile applications, voice-mail, and widgets that produce neighborhood maps that pinpoint problems.

Sparked (sparked.com) Brings people together on their website to connect volunteers with volunteer work.

Spot.us (spot.us) Lets individuals or groups share the cost in reporting news in their community by commissioning freelance journalists to write news stories. Referred to as “crowdfunded” news.

Ushahidi (ushahidi.com) Crowdsourced communications platform that helps address communications challenges during natural disasters and crises that occur around the world.

Crowd Design and Creative

99designs (99designs.com) A crowd design competition site for logos, brochures, print, t-shirts, banner ads, websites, icons, business cards, and WordPress themes.

CrowdSPRING (crowdspring.com) One of the largest crowd communities of creative individuals, with over 75,000 designers and writers connected to their site and design competitions for print design, logos, stationery, company naming, and small website design.

Guerra Creativa (en.guerra-creativa.com) Design contest site for logos, web design, stationery design, business logos, flash, or 3D design.

Logo Arena (logoarena.com) Design competition site focused on logo design.

Naming Force (namingforce.com) Creative competition site for business names, website names, and product names.

Prova (prova.com) Advertisement design contests, including logos, postcards, packaging, and websites.

Quirky (quirky.com) Brings two brand new consumer products to market each week, co-created by the company’s global community and their own expert product design staff.

Squadhelp (squadhelp.com) Freelance competitions for company names, taglines, slogans, website and usability testing, article writing, content design, logo designs, and search engine optimization (SEO) analysis.

Zooppa (zooppa.com) Global social network for creative talent for user-generated video, print, and banner advertising for leading brands.

Crowd Testing and Troubleshooting

TopCoder (topcoder.com) Competitive software design and development community with online computer programming competitions.

UserTesting.com (usertesting.com) Low-cost usability testing website where you pay per site tester.

uTest (utest.com) Marketplace for software testing services, with over 30,000 quality assurance (QA) professionals from more than 150 countries.

Crowdsourcing Feedback and Input

Crowdtap (crowdtap.com/clients) An online crowdsourcing platform with an influential

crowd offering insights into companies’ products and services.

Evly (evly.com) Platform for building a free website integrating crowdsourcing tools, social media, and e-commerce.

UserVoice (uservoice.com) Provides tools for companies to allow their customers to submit, discuss, and vote on feedback.

Crowdfunding and Crowd Fundraising

 ArtistShare (artistshare.net) Allows fans to fund musicians and other creative artists.

DonorsChoose (donorschoose.org) Online charity to help raise funds for students in need through school donations.

Givezooks! (givezooks.com) Online social fundraising platform that helps nonprofit organizations increase charitable giving within local communities by leveraging their social network contacts.

IndieGoGo (indiegogo.com) Helps anybody with an idea—creative, cause related, or entrepreneurial—to create a funding campaign, offer perks to their contributors, and get their idea funded.

Invested.in (invested.in) Interactive platform enabling users to leverage their social network contacts to raise financial capital.

Kickstarter (kickstarter.com) Funding platform for creative projects worldwide, including, but not limited to, music, film, art, technology, design, food, and publishing.

ProFounder (profounder.com) Crowdfunding site geared toward for-profit companies.

Prosper (prosper.com) Focuses on crowdfunding personal loans for people with good credit.

Sellaband (sellaband.com) A music website that helps artists raise money from their fans and the SellaBand community to record a professional album.

Crowdsourcing Work

Clickworker.com (clickworker.com/en) A Germany-based crowd labor site with over 68,000 workers performing tasks, including writing and tagging content, organizing data, and researching.

CloudCrowd (cloudcrowd.com) Helps companies break down large projects into smaller tasks, including translation, editing, data entry, image processing, Internet research, and content creation.

CrowdFlower (crowdflower.com) Accesses workers in over 70 countries through other crowdsourced labor sites such as Mechanical Turk, Samasource, Gambit, and its own iPhone app called Give Work.

LiveOps (liveops.com) Virtual call center outsourcing with trained at-home agents handling inbound and outbound calls.

Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) Micro-labor site owned by Amazon.com.

myGengo (mygengo.com) Crowdsourcing translation site.

Samasource (samasource.com) Nonprofit crowdsourcing site with a mission to “reduce poverty among people in low-income communities around the world by providing dignified, technology-based work.”

Freelancer Marketplaces

Elance (elance.com) Freelancer marketplace for skilled programmers, designers, writers, translators, marketers, researchers, and administrative contractors.

Guru (guru.com) Online marketplace for accessing freelance programmers, web developers, graphic designers, and writers.

oDesk (odesk.com) Global service marketplace for small- and medium-sized business for hiring, managing, and paying remote freelancers or teams.

vWorker (vworker.com) Formerly Rentacoder.com, an international marketplace connecting employers and entrepreneurs with virtual workers.

Ideas and Innovation

Cofundos (cofundos.org) A platform for open-source software innovation and development.

Ennovent (ennovent.com) Seeks solutions for sustainable development in energy, food, water, health, and education in rural and remote India.

Hypios (hypios.com) Helps companies solve their research and development problems by organizing online competitions with thousands of solvers from around the world.

IdeaConnection (ideaconnection.com) Open innovation challenge site for new inventions, innovations, and products.

IdeaOffer (ideaoffer.com) Competition site that pays for winning ideas.

InnoCentive (winnocentive.com) Online platform for open innovation, crowdsourcing, and innovation contests.

NineSigma (ninesigma.com) Open innovation service provider, connecting clients with a global network of innovation experts.