5 Creative Uses for Crowdsourcing

(From Mashable!, by Sarah Kessler)

When Jeff Howe coined the term “crowdsourcing” in a 2006 Wired article his examples were mainly “labor markets for specialized talents,” like iStockphoto, iFilm, and InnoCentive. But the business model of outsourcing to the crowd has grown (as has Howe’s article — he published a book on the topic in 2008).

As open-source software developers learned long ago, asking a pool of people to create something can be faster, cheaper, and more accurate than putting a project in the hands of individuals.

These five start-ups are doing just that by using crowdsourcing in creative ways.