Emoji Dick, Risk-free innovation by means of crowdsourcing?

Internet & media

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The Emoji Dick project is again a good example of how communities can work together to achieve big tasks. In order to translate a copy of Moby Dick, founder Fred Benenson is looking for a crowd to assist him. He may need all the help since he will be translating English into Emoji, a Japanese emoticon language. His working crowd consists out of so called Amazon Mechanical Turks who deliver micro-services in exchange for micro-payments. Some will focus on making multiple translated suggestions of sentences while others will choose the best versions out of them. Other people (the backers) give donations to support the project. In return they will receive one of the exclusive versions of the book, depending on the amount of money they donated. Hopefully this generates enough money to start the project so ambitious Fred can enjoy a small profit as well.

Technology makes it possible that more people than ever are offering basic services that can be delivered worldwide. So instead of contacting a professional company, one may prefer to tap into a crowd of such micro-workers. To lower the risk the Emoji Dick project will only start when enough capital has been raised. Also Quirky, another social start-up we discussed earlier, makes use of these upfront payments. An interesting strategy! More and more start-ups are using such a business model, as a result (software) services that give support to such concepts will become more important in the future. So can we conclude by saying that A bright idea + the right Technology = a Risk-free innovation. Or are these business models to good to be true? What important risks do remain?

• Kickstarter.com – community funding of extraordinary projects
• My Starbucks Idea, Free Crowdsourcing Of Product Ideas
• Quirky, get paid to influence product designs
• Will EA embrace the Free Pirate game Business model – iPhone like?
• The Context of Crowdsourcing: Start-up vs. Existing organisation

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 22:16 and is filed under Internet & media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.