While the rest of the world debates the pros and cons of crowdsourcing, the popular tech blog Techcrunch has just embraced it with open arms on the minor issue of deciding whether or not to send someone to jail.
A couple of months ago a hacker messed up the Techcrunch site by redirecting some links to smut and covering the homepage in angry messages. Well it turns out the Secret Service found the guy via a seperate investigation and are now prompting the blog to decide if they wanna throw him in the slammer.
Like any good blog, Techcrunch has delegated that decision to it’s readers, allowing them to vote yes or no on pressing charges.
The hacker was caught by bragging about the whole thing in a chat room, unfortunatly for him the entire convo was captured and published on Techcrunch, along with the comment “the readers are such huge idiots”.
This hasn’t served the poor guy well, the results currently stand at 78% voting yes for jail time. Head on over now to be part of this wonderful conviction!
I love reading about mobile crowdsourcing services, it just feels like the two fit perfectly and allows companies to come up with really creative combinations of technology and input from their user base.
Waze is one of those companies that is using people power to build a business in a pretty genius way. It’s a mapping application which users open on their GPS phone as they drive, this feeds the service with real time traffic information by measuring the actual speeds they are travelling across specific routes (if the road has a limit of 70mph and the user is going 20mph, it asks if there is traffic)
What’s even more interesting is that Waze is building up extremely accurate (and valuable) mapping data while the app is open. This means that new roads, route closures and even map inaccuracies can found way ahead of competitors like Google and Ovi Maps.
