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?
Emoji Dick, Risk-free innovation by means of crowdsourcing?
Quirky, get paid to influence product designs
Quirky, the social product development community, has a very intriguing multi-level business model that shows other web 2.0 projects that money making from day one is possible. Product developers all over the world can submit their ideas to the Quirky platform. Since the posting of these ideas will cost a designer 99 dollar, a first qualitative filtering will be made upfront. The Quirky team itself makes the final selection of which product idea will be produced and sold on the website but they make use the inputs of their online community to support their decision. These users give design advice on the product idea, the brand name, packaging and so on and will receive a small percentage of the 30% profit generated by that specific product idea. Of course also the actual designer of the product will get a share of this profit once the product has made actual sales. To lower the risk, Quirky will only start to produce and sell a product in their webshop once 500 people made a pre-sale of it. If the product idea never reaches this level, the designer will at least receive the marketing data gained of the platform. 99 dollar for these brief insights is still a fair price. Next to the submission fees of all the designers Quirky will gain of course a lot of money out of their webshop , once it will be running at full force. 
Quirky floats on top of several trends and manages to offer value for all the stakeholders involved. Design influencers win, product designers win and so does Quirky. Where other crowdsourcing plaftorms struggle to find a good balance between trading social currency (influence, exposure, reputation,…) next the ‘normal’ currency (dollars), it seems Quirky got it right. Selling user generated content is not new but this unique approach seems to have enough potential to grow large. Although this sounds promising, Quirky should be aware not to burn their money too fast since they are giving away a few dollars to those who talk about them(*) and to those who fill in a small survey. They do need of course a large community to gain momentum but the investment in new members by offering them 20 dollar (**) is maybe not that sustainable.
(*) Since we’re testing out the service as well, the quirky link in this article has a ‘referral’-identifier attached to it.
(**) You first need to submit a 1 minute survey
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