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Crowdsourcing: Uber, Airbnb, Kickstarter, & the Distributed Economy
From investor incentives, to detailed explorations of today's best funded campaigns, to a complete guide for launching your next project, Crowdsourcing: Uber, Airbnb, Kickstarter, & The Distributed Economy provides a current, comprehensive introduction to the art of raising capital in a 21st century economy.
- GenresBusiness
126 pages, Paperback
First published June 10, 2015
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 19, 2019
This book presents a very skim-level introduction and survey of different kinds of crowdsourcing, and explores many recent examples of both crowdsourcing sites/platforms and famous crowdfunding projects. It is written for those largely unfamiliar with the topic.
This book would have been better titled "Crowdfunding" as 70% of the content is devoted to this topic. It provides some good advice and steps for running your own crowdfunding campaign, along with comparisons of many platforms, and succinct background stories to a few key startup companies. There was also some interesting analysis of investment and crowdsourced venture capital, though this seemed out of place in a book that was otherwise extremely individual/consumer oriented. I was disappointed that numerous more directly relevant forms of crowdsourcing were almost entirely overlooked, such as wikis (Wikipedia) and reviews websites (UrbanSpoon/Zomato, CNET, Trivago).
The discussion is mostly surface-level and excessively optimistic. Most chapters focus exclusively on the positives of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, even when there are obvious drawbacks, tradeoffs and unsolved problems (though some chapters do briefly touch on these). I had hoped that the chapter "Transparency and Reputation Management" would explore the ethical and regulatory difficulties platforms have in authenticating online parties and the integrity of content; and in the sociological factors in reputation networks. Instead it basically claimed that social networks are going to solve corruption by keeping big corporate accountable (when it is already widely known that these platforms are easily subverted by corporate interests).
This is a helpful and accessible book for those who wish to skim briefly on the topic or wish to participate in online crowdsourcing platforms. It is not very useful for those seeking a more in-depth analysis of crowdsourcing.
This book would have been better titled "Crowdfunding" as 70% of the content is devoted to this topic. It provides some good advice and steps for running your own crowdfunding campaign, along with comparisons of many platforms, and succinct background stories to a few key startup companies. There was also some interesting analysis of investment and crowdsourced venture capital, though this seemed out of place in a book that was otherwise extremely individual/consumer oriented. I was disappointed that numerous more directly relevant forms of crowdsourcing were almost entirely overlooked, such as wikis (Wikipedia) and reviews websites (UrbanSpoon/Zomato, CNET, Trivago).
The discussion is mostly surface-level and excessively optimistic. Most chapters focus exclusively on the positives of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, even when there are obvious drawbacks, tradeoffs and unsolved problems (though some chapters do briefly touch on these). I had hoped that the chapter "Transparency and Reputation Management" would explore the ethical and regulatory difficulties platforms have in authenticating online parties and the integrity of content; and in the sociological factors in reputation networks. Instead it basically claimed that social networks are going to solve corruption by keeping big corporate accountable (when it is already widely known that these platforms are easily subverted by corporate interests).
This is a helpful and accessible book for those who wish to skim briefly on the topic or wish to participate in online crowdsourcing platforms. It is not very useful for those seeking a more in-depth analysis of crowdsourcing.
Displaying 1 of 1 review