Info Crowd Sourcing

Crowdsourcing Cybersecurity; Why You Should Go for It

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Crowdsourcing, otherwise called crowdfunding, is rapidly gaining momentum among many individuals, organizations, and agencies to provide various services. The crowdsourcing approach is about the acquisition of ideas and services from a broad range of people, mostly the online communities, instead of the conventional local employees or suppliers. And there are many outstanding results from the collaboration of a wide range of multiple professionals. An example of such outcomes is the manufacture of a machinery system that helps protect you from unfavorable environmental conditions.

Cybersecurity, on the other hand, is a basic necessity you should consider ensuring. In this digital age, we perform various activities online using digital devices, which necessitates the need for cybersecurity. Cybercrime is a robust economic growth inhibitor and a negative catalyst to general progress and development. Somewhere now, as you read this article, some malicious individual is developing malware to cause online havoc to careless users.

However, you can be on the defense side with the use of crowdsourcing. It would be best if you considered trusting crowdsourcing enough as a successful solution to protect your digital system, thereby ensuring maximum cybersecurity. Here are six other reasons you should consider the crowdsourcing approach for your cybersecurity.

Access to Diverse Inputs

A tree, they say, doesn’t make a forest. Crowdsourcing is a remarkable initiative that affords you access to diverse and multifaceted inputs from many professional experts in the world of cybersecurity. Engaging in crowdsourcing will enable you to use the best services to protect your digital engagements, unlike the usual passive inputs from local employees.

Scarcity of Human Resources

In this digital age, whether as a private individual, private and public organization, or government agency, you undoubtedly make use of the internet as a platform for carrying out many crucial activities. And there is a need for more cyber experts due to the staggering daily increase in cybercrimes and digital exploitations.

Unfortunately, there’s an impactful shortage of cyber experts and professionals in many organizations today. Importing cybergeeks or neglecting to protect your digital interactions won’t do any good. Likewise, insourcing doesn’t completely protect you from online manipulations, and neglection will only worsen your vulnerability to cyberattacks.

Crowdsourcing, therefore, is the only appropriate solution that will fill this gap of cybersecurity deficit. When you utilize the crowdsourcing approach, you’d have access to specialized skills from the top and experienced cyber professionals worldwide. You wouldn’t have to worry about the scarcity of professional cyber experts.

Boost Your Reputation

Especially as an organization, crowdsourcing will largely boost your reputation and credibility. A headline hitting digital breach or havoc can tarnish your organization’s hard-earned fame as customers wouldn’t want their data to get into the control of mischievous hackers.

Otherwise, they might become skeptical of your commitment to ensuring cybersecurity and thereby get discouraged about partnering further with you. Therefore, commencing a crowdfunding approach for your cybersecurity is a vital testimonial to your diligence, which will consecutively increase your patronage, and boost your credibility.

Increased Security for Your Cyber System

Crowdsourcing is an excellent tool for securing your digital transactions and testing the effectiveness of the security measures you deploy from time to time. You can engage with popular crowdsourcing verified platforms such as GoFund me, Patreon, Rockethub, and others. These platforms have many exceptional members, including extraordinarily cyber experts who can timely tackle any cyber problems you might face.

In this present climax of security risks that hackers can exploit, you can’t afford to be complacent. It would be best if you kept pace with the cybercriminals’ rising profiles who are desperate to wreak havoc in corporate networks and systems. Therefore, you should consider engaging the services of crowdsourcing platforms to keep a dutiful watch on your online security system to avoid any intrusion or unauthorized access. Doing so will highly assure you that come what may, there is top-notch security for your cyber dealings.

Cost Optimization

Crowdsourcing will help you conserve the available financial resources as you don’t have to keep employing cyber experts fully. You only have to pay your enlisted service providers when there is a rendition of useful services such as detection of bug or malware. Crowdsourcing is a no-service, no-pay approach which allows you to affordably and yet effectively ensure your cybersecurity.

Conclusion

Even though there are abundant advantages you’ll richly enjoy using the crowdsourcing technique; you’ve to be careful and thoroughly scrutinize any service you consider enlisting. Cybersecurity is a sensitive approach, and you should consider treating it as such.

Don’t just use any random services to avoid falling into the hands of faceless hackers with ulterior cynical motives. You can make use of verified crowdsourcing platforms to avoid exploitations. Crowdsourcing is still the best approach there is, for cybersecurity, and all man’s needs.

5 Recent Trends in Crowdsourcing Technologies

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Things are changing faster than ever before.

Technology has made it easier to access the crowd’s experience, knowledge and resources.

Crowdsourcing technologies can offer services, funding, and navigation. It’s accelerating problem-solving, innovation and politics.

Speed is critical in the modern digital economy.

But…

Many large companies are too slow.

Crowdsourcing Week developed the Hyperloop Innovation to showcase the essence of embracing talent on demand.

Innovation is no longer an isolated aspect of any company. Every business must pioneer its journey towards innovation.

And…

Crowdsourcing makes it easier and faster to be innovative because it’s bigger than a movement.

The new DNA of the society in the physical and digital world in the future will be crowdsourcing.

Today, fear and scarcity are driving the global economy despite the mindsets being lethal for the society at large. However, crowdsourcing can be the driver of every human on the face of the earth towards their general wellbeing.

All it takes is looking to the crowd for supply to meet demand.

Most crowdsourcing platforms have deployed challenges that users can take part in as often as they want to engage them. The participants are exposed to varied problems.

Crowdsourcing is all about talents, passions, tangible resources, and skills.

Maia Weinstock, the creator of Women of NASA, developed a LEGO toy that inspired a new generation and her invention sold out on Amazon in just a couple of months earlier in the year.

Maia is a science journalist and currently MIT News’ deputy editor.

What other possibilities are available with crowdsourcing?

If you have a rough idea or concept that needs polishing or flushing out, or a problem that needs a solution, crowdsourcing is the way to go.

But…

What’s Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is the facilitation of talents, passions, tangible resources, and skills through high tech platforms. It occurs at all levels across different industries.

Growing connectivity has made it easier to collectively mobilize and contribute time, ideas, funds or expertise from individuals to support causes or projects. This is what defines crowdsourcing.

In the increasingly-connected world, the human-centric future will be about co-creation and participation.

Established business models are finding it hard to adapt to crowdsourcing, which has redefined how companies work. This is attributed to the fact that collective mobilization provides a great chance to reinvent and rethink traditional processes.

Crowdsourcing is also known as:

  • Co-creation
  • Crowdfunding
  • Open innovation
  • Collaboration

Crowdsourcing is a new work process of sourcing people in crowds to perform a task usually done by a single contractor or employees. The main categories of crowdsourcing include:

Crowdsourcing continues to gain momentum as new trends come up in the industry. Here’re a few trends worth noting:

Top 5 Megatrends in Crowdsourcing that You Should Know

 1) Early adoption

Crowdsourcing is a familiar term among many. However, it’s still in the phase of its early adoption.

Many people are familiar with crowdsourcing.

But…

Only a small percentage know everything it can do.

For instance, most tech geeks are familiar with 99designs and its role in crowdsourcing. However, very few can list other roles of crowdsourcing.

Did you know that you can test your new website, build a car or even volunteer your time to a charity through crowdsourcing?

You can also outsource cyber security. For instance, you can post an identity theft problem to get likely solutions from crowds with the right talent. Crowdsourcing will provide lots of things you can adopt as solutions to the problem.

2) Curated crowds

In crowdsourcing, bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better results. The early crowdsourcing design sites days have proven this fact.

For instance, a design contest with an output of 1000 designs can easily become unmanageable. If you offer a large prize, almost anyone with some design skills is likely to make a contribution.

However, this doesn’t mean that a large crowd automatically results in poor results. There’ll be some bad designs among the good.

This means you’re likely to get many good designs to sift through but the bad ones would take up more of your time.

A curated crowd model like Genius Rocket was created to solve this issue. Although any designer can join the crowd, only those who’ve proven to be talented are allowed to participate in projects.

Another site working on a curated model is LogoTournament.

3) Standardization of crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is an undefined space, hence not an industry.

Crowdsourcing leaders are working to standardize and define the space. Players can discuss what’s happening in groups like Crowdsortium.

David Alan Grier and Daily Crowdsource are leading the undefined space towards standardization.

The former has been pushing for the creation of a trade association and is currently discussing it publicly. The leaders are trying to define the crowdsourcing taxonomy officially.

All the efforts being made to standardize crowdsourcing are aimed at fostering a healthy future.

4) Quality Improvements

More crowdsourcing platforms are increasingly adopting microtasking. This is due to the success resulting from deployment of the basic input/output model typical of MTurk and adding another quality control level.

MTurk sometimes provide less than correct results.

However, sites like Microtask & Serv.io have deployed additional QA and redundancy checks to improve accuracy levels. The platforms can maintain high accuracy if requested.

Due to no extra expense involved, people will increasingly demand for 99.9% to 100% accuracy.

5) Corporate acceptance

Crowdsourcing isn’t a fad; it’s enjoying great corporate acceptance.

Several Fortune 100 companies have taken action to adopt crowdsourcing with General Electric taking the lead. The company has several open multi-million dollar innovation projects.

Other large companies running crowdsourcing projects include:

  • Procter & Gamble
  • General Motors
  • PepsiCo

Amazon runs one of the largest crowdsourcing platforms, MTurk.

Large corporations usually don’t implement new processes fast. But, the few that stepped into crowdsourcing will make it easier for other Fortune 100 companies to join the league.

Similarly, smaller companies will follow suit.

7 Benefits of Crowdsourcing for Small and Medium Enterprises

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Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) thrive by minimizing their expenses and maximizing profits. Regardless of their industries, they are always looking for ways to save more money. And this is why the crowdsourcing technique has become popular.

Crowdsourcing involves using a large number of people to seek information, produce goods, or offer services. It outsources the work to others who are not the organization’s employees.

The introduction of technology has further made crowdsourcing easier. Now, you can crowdsource online and reach people from different backgrounds irrespective of the kind of service you provide. Crowdsourcing is not limited in its use. It has a variety of application that cuts across various fields.

For instance, security agencies such as the police and FBI use it quite frequently to solve security problems. They are known to use crowd intelligence gathering to seek out information as part of their investigation.

SMEs have also found crowdsourcing very useful. They can use it to gain insight into what consumers are interested in by asking for their preferences. It can also tell the demographics and the profile of their consumers.

If you own a small or medium enterprise, you might want to learn about the benefits of crowdsourcing. Here are seven of them.

Reduces Cost

If you have never used crowdsourcing before, you might think it is expensive. The truth, however, is that it is way cheaper than traditional methods of employing people. With crowdsourcing, you can cut down on tax payments, huge employee benefits, and other costs that will arise from hiring permanent staff.

For instance, if you need graphic design work done, hiring a graphic designer in-house will cost you thousands. However, crowdsourcing offers you options of different designers from whom you can select based on their rates.

Saves Time

As a business owner, you can only hire as many people as your enterprise can afford. However, there are often instances when your employee’s strength might not be enough to get things done quickly enough. If you have a time-sensitive project, this kind of situation might become burdensome and end up unpalatable.

Crowdsourcing can be an easy solution, however. For instance, if you own a small business, and you need to carry out a market survey, you can crowdsource online by asking a vast pool of people to vote or fill out electronic forms. This way, you will be able to get faster results in a short time frame.

Offers Creativity

Are you having difficulty coming up with new ideas? You will be amazed at how crowdsourcing can help out. One of its significant benefits is that crowdsourcing links you up with professionals who will offer hundreds of ideas or different approaches to solving a problem.

However, if you think a large number of people could translate to low-quality ideas and solutions, that might be untrue. In reality, the competition created by crowdsourcing drives people to think outside the box and offer more creative solutions. You will find out that many successful organizations make use of crowdsourcing to brainstorm and come up with mind-blowing ideas.

Offers Diversity

Crowdsourcing exposes you to a vast range of people, which in turn gives you access to a broad network of skills, thoughts, knowledge, contents, talent, and expertise that your employees may not offer. When you crowdsource online, you will interact with people from different cultures and backgrounds whose unique perspectives can benefit your company.

More Collaborative

Since small and medium enterprises are breeding grounds for familiarity, many employers assume that their employees are united. However, the reality is that there may be workplace conflict among them. A more collaborative approach involves bringing together a group of people—crowdsourcing—devoid of bias ideas or emotional attachments. Their input may help you fish out valuable information that your in-house team may have overlooked.

Has Marketing Benefits

Many companies invite the public for contests, asking them to come up with suggestions for their services. Many more companies seek out people to test their products for intelligence gathering purposes. These methods do not only help them with great ideas, but they also create extensive media coverage for their products or services, which is a perfect marketing strategy.

When you crowdsource, you give a large group of people something to talk about, creating a marketing buzz for your company. Crowdsourcing, therefore, attracts the people who might be your target market, giving you a more extensive customer base.

Minimizes Management’s Burden

Crowdsourcing is quite appealing as it offers you a chance to give your work-related burden to others to sort out. It is a way of delegating duties to make work easier. Think “division of labor.” You share the work among other people to minimize the burden. That way, you can focus on the management aspect of the work.

In conclusion, the benefits of crowdsourcing far outweigh the benefits of hiring in-house staff only. It utilizes crowd intelligence and creativity, which can significantly reduce your organization’s expenses and speed up important work. Whereas permanent employees may have idle times, crowdsourced employees are only needed when there is a job to do. If you own a small or medium enterprise, you should leverage crowdsourcing to reduce your workload and get you closer to your target market. Irrespective of the nature of your service, crowdsourcing will help you thrive.

Advantages of Info Crowdsourcing About Physical Fitness

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If there is a topic that has many misconceptions and myths, then, it is weight loss. You will reach a point in which you are desperate to lose weight that you can do anything just to make sure that you can lose that weight of course, in an easier way. Physical fitness is always the most common way of losing weight. At the same time, if you do not do it right then it can even be a source of weight gain. To avoid this, you need to use crowdsourcing just to have diverse ideas on the best physical fitness routine that will aid in weight loss. What is the advantage of info crowdsourcing?

You get workable solutions
When someone tells you that he used some specific exercise then you have a chance to even check the before and after images just as a proof of the success. Some of the terms that are used in physical fitness may be technical. With crowdsourcing, you can use the multimedia content to even create a video and share it online for people to have the correct way of exercising especially for low impact exercise for weight loss.

You have practical exercises for you
You might even just not want to read but you want to practice it if doable in your case. This is the forum where you get a virtual fitness instructor which comes in handy to help you in the physical fitness. At the same time, you might even create a schedule and do it at the same time virtually – thanks to technology.

It can motivate you to act
The moment you know you have people who have gone through the same challenge and you know that you are not alone in this so the more that you get motivated you to make time and effort to have a healthy lifestyle. It is not easy to stick to a fitness schedule but when you know you are answerable to a specific group then you have to option but to stick to it. The long-term effect is that you will reach your goals in a smooth manner.

You widen your support system for the weight loss journey
This is not a walk in the park, you just need a strong support system. Aside from your friends, you can also bank on virtual friends from the crowdsourcing platforms. The fact that it has chat services makes it even bigger and better for you.

Learn from experience
Psychologists say that experience is the best teacher. This is the time you now know that you need to learn the rules of the game from experience, Now that you know that you have the right support system and you are sure that you can stick to the schedule. This is when you now also have knowledge of what works best for you even to teach the rest.

Although confidentiality of crowdsourcing platforms is always compromised, physical fitness is not something that you will really need to hide from people. It is one of the best technological toolkits which was designed to make sure that the objective of the world is a global village is reached.