Eric Edelstein

Take a crowd, give them a problem, ask them a question, get them involved.

Crowdsourcing simply means getting a group of people to get involved rather than a single person or company.

Imagine you were standing round a braai and asked a group of friends for an opinion on something that interests you?

Now imagine you were standing round a virtual braai and there was a 100,000 people who had an opinion?

That is crowd-sourcing. The power of the crowd!

Up to recently, accessing the power of the crowd was difficult if not impossible. Now with the internet bringing us all together (Facebook reached 350 million users at the time of writing this article), reaching the crowd has become relatively easy.

For an example of crowdsourcing, see a venture i’m involved in - springleap.com - this crowdsourcing t-shirt platform brings together creative people from around the world to submit their best t-shirt designs, and gets the general public to vote, on which one should win, be manufactured and sold.

For more info about crowdsourcing, read Jeff Howe’s excellent book on the power of the crowd.