Casey Armstrong: Saving The World, Going Open-Source, Turning People Into Robots

Casey Armstrong has been a busy man. Formerly the content director at Daily Crowdsource, Armstrong has recently founded his own company, VineStove. A crowd labor/ microtasking site at heart, VineStove’s general essence is similar to that of Amazon Mechanical Turk, ShortTask, or Fiverr. People post jobs or tasks for others to carry out, and pay them a small amount for doing so. These are tasks that can typically be completed in the ballpark of five minutes; example tasks on VineStove’s homepage include photoshopping an image or researching payment plans.

The thing that sets VineStove apart from those sites, however, is the fact that all the work is done on a strictly volunteer basis. Payment is still rendered, but instead of going to the person doing the work, it’s donated to a charity or nonprofit organization of the worker’s choice. And according to Armstrong, the companies are “doing some pretty cool things. I just added the SENS Foundation, for example; they work on longevity research. Channeling money to them means we all get to live a little longer!”

Casey’s Gift To The World

There’s another layer to Armstrong’s world-saving scheme. In addition to providing labor and funding for these foundations, he intends to eventually make VineStove open-source, allowing anyone with adequate interest to have access to the entirety of code he uses to run his site.

“The end game for me is really the open-source project,” Armstrong affirms. “I want to see microtasking get big and mature faster. I am addicted to sites like mTurk and Quora,  and microvolunteering sites like Sparked; I want microtasking to become a part of everything, really.”

He sees the open-source release of VineStove to be an important step in the process. “It might seem like a gutsy move, but I firmly believe that a crowdsourcing platform is about what you put into it, and not its clever construction or web development. I had struggled to build a microtasking site for years. It took me a lot of effort to learn web development, research my options, and plan it all out… I wish VineStove could have gone up in three clicks years ago.”

By releasing VineStove’s source code to the public, Armstrong’s intention is that anyone with a reasonable amount of dedication will be able to build a platform to serve their purposes, with minimal technical knowledge required. Like a true altruist, he hopes to render the hardships that he himself encountered in building his platform obsolete.

Right, But What’s This About Turning Folks Into Robots?

Getting a site ready to go open-source isn’t an easy task. It takes money, and for a small team like Armstrong’s, a certain amount of extra hands. And oddly enough, the solution to those problems can be found in the form of a crowdfunded robotic intern.

I discussed crowdfunding a little bit last week; it’s the process of soliciting funding for a project from good-hearted denizens of the Internet instead of trying to get a big corporation or fatcat to bankroll the whole thing. Armstrong’s current project on RocketHub intends to do just that, providing the capital to make VineStove open-source through donations by people like you and me.

The robotic intern is the reward. Donate at least $5, and you’ll earn the ability to join Armstrong in his team on the project by piloting the robot as a proxy. You’ll be able to freely move around the VineStove office, interact with the staff, help out with the website, or even just drive the thing into Casey’s foot for half an hour (if that’s your thing).

While the ability for VineStove to get a different intern with a different skill set each day is one that will undoubtedly add some flexibility to Armstrong’s team, he also states that the project has an aspect of novelty as well. “The robot idea is mostly just fun. I don’t know where it will lead. However, I’m a believer in the internet spilling out into the real world, and I think we’re going to see more internet controlled robots in the future,” Armstrong says. He went on to reference similar projects in the past, particularly one in which mTurk allowed people to remotely control a robotic arm to perform common household tasks.

Become a Member of Team Armstrong

If any bit of this sounds appealing to you, know that there is more than ample opportunity for you to join in and help Casey save the world. With a little more than two weeks left in the funding campaign, there’s plenty of time to donate and help bring microtasking to the masses. If you’ve got a unique set of skills, you can put them to work by signing up to be one of the robotic interns, or just using VineStove itself to do some good-old charity work; all you need is a Facebook registration.

Whether you want to live forever, build your own thriving online community, or just mess around with a robot for a few hours, Casey Armstrong has you covered, and the world is better off because of it.

CrowdsUnite Is Your One-Stop Shop for Crowdfunding

Attention entrepreneurs! CrowdsUnite has emerged as a deadly useful new service, making its way onto the scene with the intention of connecting you with the perfect platform for crowdfunding your dream business, product or artistic endeavor.

What is crowdfunding, you may ask? A fair question; it’s a topic I’ve only addressed a couple times on this blog. Crowdfunding is a specific type of crowdsourcing that aims to change the way that large projects receive funding. Instead of the people behind these projects appealing to an official board or a wealthy corporation for their startup money, they turn the challenge to the “crowd”.

Crowdfunding sites typically consist of a large collection of project plans, and allow individuals browsing the site to donate money to projects they wish to see carried out. Kickstarter and Indiegogo are two of the most popular of these brand of sites; Kickstarter users alone pledged over $319 million in 2012.

In addition, users typically receive some sort of compensation in exchange for their donation to up-and-coming projects. Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects offer prizes to donors depending on how much money they chip in; the looser your purse-strings, the greater the reward. Other sites offer a return on your investment once the project takes off, and still others even offer equity, allowing you to share in your project’s success.

CrowdsUnite aims to become the main compendium of crowdfunding sites. “What Amazon did for retail, we want to do for the crowdfunding industry,” says Alex Feldman, the CEO and founder of CrowdsUnite. Since many crowdfunding platforms are specifically geared towards certain types of projects, and since more of them keep popping up every day, a single place where they are all collected, sorted, and categorized is extremely useful. In the future, Feldman says he hopes that CrowdsUnite will be the first stop for any individual who wants to find the perfect platform to start their crowdfunding campaign.

The site’s features, while constantly improving, are already quite robust. All of the most popular and successful platforms have detailed profile pages on CrowdsUnite, where potential campaign managers can view information such as fee structure, the nature of how the platform handles compensation, and if the platform is specific to certain countries. Additionally, CrowdUnite’s visitors can view reviews, comments, and articles  for each platform, submitted by their fellow users. Possibly the most useful feature is the ability to compare two or more platforms side-by-side to see how they stack up against each other.

If you’d like to help CrowdUnite on its way to becoming the go-to Wikipedia for crowdfunding, the best thing to do it hop over to the site and register an account. Fleshing out the information on various platforms by submitting content is a great way to get your favorite platform noticed and discover new ones. Feldman also adds that he is looking for business partners; if you are an industry professional or consultant that wants to explore the crowdfunding space, the relationship that CrowdsUnite holds with these platform administrators would be useful to you.

Never Hire a Freelancer Again

Reblogged from Work 3.0:

Don't get ahead of me.

Freelancers, for many industries, are a fact of life. Media outlets hire them constantly to get fresh perspectives on newsworthy events. Programming development firms often include a revolving door of freelance or third-party programming and QA teams. And many artists subside entirely on freelancing, taking different jobs every few weeks or even every few days. According to this survey from CareerBuilder.com, 

Read more… 614 more words

My first article for Ziptask's blog, Work 3.0! I won't make a habit of posting my Ziptask stuff here, but this is an exception.

Dominos Call For The Ultimate Delivery Vehicle Illustrates Importance of a Solid Platform

I had to do a double-take. How is it that of all the companies pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into their crowdsourcing efforts, the one to finally get it is Dominos? I am referring, of course, to their Ultimate Delivery Vehicle Project, currently in phase 1 of 5.

The plan was simple, but one that had nonetheless tripped up countless entities in the past. Dominos would solicit project designs from the crowd, one would rise to the top, and that designer would be rewarded handsomely with oodles of cash ($10,000) and worldwide fame. Oh, right, and their design becomes reality.

So what makes Dominos so unique in their approach? Just a bit of classic crowdsourcing wisdom, applied creatively. When you need a large group of people, in one place, to carry out a singular goal, don’t attempt to cultivate the group yourself; just go where the crowd already exists.

This was handled beautifully by hosting the contest with Local Motors’  The Forge, a site specifically dedicate to designers who want to create vehicles. In one move, Dominos weeded out every person who was not interested in both vehicles and designing, and the site’s sign-up verification features took away just enough user anonymity to prevent disaster. So when you browse through the contest entries, you don’t see the normal mix of 90% crap and 10% usable. It’s quite the opposite; almost every entry has an extremely high level of professionalism, complete with detailed sketches, 3D mockups, and other explanatory content.

There was one more masterstroke by Dominos, and it wasn’t even that complicated; they just posted a really, really, stunningly detailed design brief. That’s it. They simply listed every possible thing a user would need to know about the company, the drivers, the product, the things the car needs to have, and the contest details. It seems like a minor step, but again, it’s unfortunately not something you see most companies do when they host a contest like this. It’s a small gesture that shows Dominos is serious, and that they expect their users’ entries to be as well.

I applaud Dominos, for taking a bold step forward and in the process demonstrating to any other company interested in crowdsourcing that, really, all you need is to treat it like a legitimate-ass business transaction. It’s the tiniest bit of effort that really shines through, and I sincerely hope that when all is said and done, Dominos finds themselves with a really great fleet of community-designed vehicles.

ThinkGeek Opens Its Doors To Your Weird Product Ideas

 

Like Steam before it, the geek-culture retail powerhouse ThinkGeek has finally announced that they will allow their customers to have a greater role in the product development process. It comes in the form of IdeaFactory, where users can send their ideas to ThinkGeek though their online submission form. ThinkGeek reviews the idea, decides whether or not to produce it, and pays the user if they decide to go ahead with it.

On the surface, this is pretty similar to Quirky, but with some major key differences:

• ThinkGeek is big. It has the advantage, like Steam, of already being a well-loved and established retail platform with profits well into the millions. They have the money to spend to make a project like this great, and a huge army of ravenous supporters ready to submit their ideas. Quirky has neither of these advantages.
• The process is so, so easy. All the online submission form asks for is a product name and as much description or image as you’re willing to give. The rest is contact info; your name, address, phone number, and agreement to the Terms and Conditions. In the time it took me to type this, you could have submitted five ideas already. After that, ThinkGeek takes care of the whole thing; no garnering votes, no contacting manufacturers, no raising money. They just make your idea into a product, simple as that.
• The rewards are huge. Just from ThinkGeek green-lighting your concept, you net a cool thousand dollars. After that comes the real stuff. A 10% cut of the product’s profits until it hits $1 million in sales (5% after that, still not bad). A very heavy discount if you want to buy your own product. And perhaps most importantly, the ability to sell the product on your own website, make trade show appearances, and generally keep all bragging rights and fame from your idea.

So if you have an idea for a cool computer accessory, geeky article of clothing, or inventive toy, now’s the time. Submit your idea now, before everyone catches wind of this and floods the system with “human-to-Wookie translator”-caliber ideas.