In praise of mob rule: Great ideas get crowdsourcing boost

A Kickstarter project called Tile set out to raise $20,000 to create small, flat, battery-powered stickers that you attach to your stuff, enabling you to find anything with your smartphone.

They've raised more than $1.6 million so far.

But why?

Tracker gadgets have been around for years. They're useful for finding your lost remote control, keys and other objects. But Tile does something incredible that no other tracking product can. Here's how it works.

You attach a tile to your tablet, remote control, dog's collar or you drop it into your purse, backpack or briefcase. Use the smartphone app to register each Tile device—basically tell the Tile cloud service what object each Tile is associated with.

To find an item, you use the app to make it "ring," then follow the noise. Or you can walk around looking at a proximity display showing you when you're getting closer or farther away. It basically turns your phone into a divining rod.

But here's the awesome feature that drove Kickstarter contributions through the roof: If you lose something—say, your bike is stolen or you leave your phone in a taxi, you log into your online Tile account and report the item as lost.

At that point, every Tile gadget in the world keeps a lookout for your lost item. If your dog or phone or car or bike gets within 50 to 150 feet of any other Tile owned by any user, you'll get a notification showing you where on a map your Tile was detected.

How cool is that?

Crowdsourcing makes Tile different from any other tracking device. Tile leverages "network effect" like cell phones do, meaning that the value of Tile as a product gets higher as more people become users.

Come to think of it, so many of today's hottest products do something similar—they get their value from the collective actions of users. (See also "5 tips for running a successful crowdsourcing campaign.")

The most important web-based services on the Internet—specifically social networks and search engines—are spectacularly valuable and enjoyable sites precisely because they represent sorting algorithms applied to crowdsourced data.

Look what Silicon Valley giants are spending the truly big bucks for these days: Apps and services that do smart things with the data generated by massive numbers of users.


Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram, a service that's fun to join because it's full of awesome photos provided not by Instagram, but by other users.

Google paid a billion dollars for a tiny Israeli startup called Waze, which is all about crowdsourcing. Waze is a navigation service that you can use to get directions similar to Google Maps.

But Waze is also an engine of crowdsourcing. For example, the location of every opted-in user is uploaded anonymously to the servers. Waze then determines how fast each phone—and by extension, each car—is moving. That gives you real-time information about the speed of traffic. Waze also lets users report things like gas prices, observations about why traffic is jammed and the location of police cars.

You'll notice that both these billion-dollar startups are social networks acquired by bigger social networks. That's because social networks get all their juice from crowdsourcing.

Social network crowdsourcing is valuable to users because not only can individuals use social networks to do crowdsourcing of their own—for example, I crowdsourced ideas for this very column—but social action surfaces the best content on the social networks, either through Google+'s "What's Hot" list, Facebook's EdgeRank, or Twitter's Discover page.

There are two basic kinds of crowdsourcing—the kind where people consciously participate, and the kind where they don't.

Waze, for example, uses both kinds. The reporting of observations is conscious, the uploading of speed and location data is not.

Some of the coolest innovations in crowdsourcing tend to be invisible to the user. For example, Google owns a service called reCAPTCHA, which it acquired four years ago. You probably use reCAPTCHA all the time. It's primary purpose is to prove you're human. reCAPTCHA shows you two words with distorted lettering that make it hard for computers to recognize but relatively easy for humans to do so.

Here's the magic part: One of those words presented to you is a word scanned by Google from a library book or from the archives of The New York Times. Questionable scanned words are inserted into the reCAPTCHA rotation, and large numbers of users are shown the same word. When enough users type in the same word, that word is accepted as the correct one for the digital copy that will be stored and indexed for all time.

Google is using the amazing pattern recognition capabilities of millions of distributed human brains to perfect its optical character recognition software.

Other astonishing applications of the crowdsourcing idea can be found in CrowdMed, Deliv, Nike+ Places, Metwit, RideShip, Root Metrics, Quora and Weathermob.

Crowdsourcing has been getting some bad press lately, and for bad reasons.

For example, Google built a site called Google Flu Trends, which ideally can track and even predict the spread of flu across the world. In the past, Flu Trends has been accurate. But during the most recent flu season, Flu Trends " wildly overestimated" the outbreak.

Flu Trends crowdsources search queries for information about flu and thereby is supposed to indicate actual flu.

The problem with this assumption is that it doesn't measure actual flu at all—it measures public anxiety about flu, which is subject to media manipulation. People go rushing to the search engines to find out about flu symptoms when the news is hyped about a coming outbreak.

social networks
Another supposed failure is the crowdsourcing on the social network Reddit of the manhunt for the Boston Bomber terrorist suspects. While actual events were unfolding, many on Reddit falsely identified a young man as a suspect. The man had been missing before the Boston bombing and was later found dead.

In general, crowdsourcing that tracks actual behavior is more useful and accurate than crowdsourcing that tracks opinions and attitudes.

Crowdsourcing is great for surfacing options to choose from (as I did with my crowdsourcing for this article). It's great for brainstorming and getting ideas. And it's great for gathering large numbers of data points and applying algorithms to that data.

Crowdsourcing isn't so great when you assume a weak correlation between measured attitudes and something else. It's important to remember that all you're really crowdsourcing is the attitudes, which can be manipulated, either by the media or by the crowd itself.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with crowdsourcing as an idea. In fact, it's one of the most powerful and useful and even life-saving concepts in technology today.

As we enter the era of Big Data, we'll increasingly benefit from data harvested from the actions or input from big crowds. These benefits will range from finding cures for diseases to finding your lost TV remote.

Let's hope the crowdsourcing space gets even more crowded.

Corner Office: Paul English of Kayak, on Nurturing New Ideas

Q. Did you have the entrepreneurial itch early on?

A. I always wanted to just try new things, and I think it was probably in my DNA or something. As a kid, I would see something I didn’t like, and I wanted to make it better. So, for example, we had a phone in my house that was a one-line dial phone, and I had to get a second phone line for my computer. So I rewired the phone to handle two lines. I was really proud of that phone.

Q. And what about your high school years?

A. I had lots of side interests, but I wasn’t very interested in studying in high school. My grades were pretty much all D’s, and I didn’t apply to college. The only reason I went to college was that my parents found out I could go to state school for free because of my SAT scores. I had a day job and I went to school at night. But I had a different job every 12 to 18 months because I’d get bored and I’d want to learn something new.

Q. Once you launched your career, what were some leadership lessons you learned?

A. The most important thing I learned is something I’m still actually working on, which is how to be really blunt with feedback. It’s the most difficult thing for a manager to do. But I worked hard at it, because when managers were blunt with me, it hurt a little bit, but I’m very grateful to those few managers who helped me.

I developed this technique over the years. When I gave people their performance reviews, I would literally take a crinkled envelope, and I’d write five words on it. I would take them out to lunch, and I’d say to them, “Let’s say I left this company, and five years from now I was sitting in a bar and someone said, ‘Hey, what’s that guy like?’ What I would tell them is what I’m going to tell you. And there are two or three words that are positive, and there are two or three words that are really negative.” I would give examples and I would give them the piece of paper, so I had no written record of what we had talked about. One guy in particular e-mailed me 10 years later, and claimed that he still carries that piece of paper around. That really reinforced for me the idea that the best way you can help someone is to be on their side and to be honest with them.

Q. You were a co-founder of Kayak nine years ago. What’s unusual about the culture?

A. We’re a little bit reckless in our decision-making — not with the business, but the point is that we try things. We give even junior people scary amounts of power to come up with ideas and implement them. We had an intern last summer who, on his very first day at Kayak, came up with an idea, wrote the code and released it. It may or may not have been successful, but it almost doesn’t matter, because it showed that we value speed, and we value testing ideas, not talking about them.

It’s all about fast iteration. When you push down decisions, and you don’t require people to write up plans and do designs by consensus, enormous amounts of work just disappear. We cut out all the middle layers and you let the designers talk to the customers. Otherwise, something gets lost in translation with a lot of layers.

Q. What else?

A. We’re known for having very small meetings, usually three people. There’s a little clicker for counting people that hangs on the main conference room door. The reason it’s there is to send a message to people that I care about this issue. If there’s a bunch of people in the room, I’ll stick my head in and say, “It takes 10 of you to decide this? There aren’t three of you smart enough to do this?”

I just hate design by consensus. No innovation happens with 10 people in a room. It’s very easy to be a critic and say why something won’t work. I don’t want that because new ideas are like these little precious things that can die very easily. Two or three people will nurture it, and make it stronger, give it a chance to see life.

Q. How do you hire?

A. You always have to be recruiting. When I meet somebody who’s amazing, I’ll often say to them, “Who’s the smartest person you’ve ever met?” My team might be sick of me asking the question, because I’ll keep asking. Finally, after the third or fourth time, they’ll say, “You know, there was this person.”

Then the two criteria I really look for are productivity — which is about speed and judgment and drive — and the second one is fun. A lot of companies have the no-jerks rule. But I have the “no neutrals” rule.

Q. Can you explain that?

A. We want to be a hyperproductive company and we want to make it fun, and I make a commitment to people that in 20 years they’ll look back and say this was the most fun job they had. If you surround them with people who are annoying or just kind of neutral, it’s going to make the job a drag. And you don’t ever want to hurt someone’s creative energy.

Certainly, annoying people will hurt them, and so will people who are just kind of boring. They’re nice, but they don’t ever provoke the creative person in a fun way. That diminishes their productivity. If I have a commitment to improving people’s productivity and fun, then I have to surround them with people who are fun and who will challenge them.

Q. So how do you get at that in an interview?

A. I know how to assess people about their speed and their product sense and their technical skills. The area that’s much harder to assess is culture. So I’ll look at the résumé, and find something that’s interesting. Then I’ll have them describe to me the team they worked with, and I’ll ask them about each person on the team — “Tell me something they did that blew you away and tell me something they did that annoyed you.” I make them talk about real people and the real product. From that, I can figure out their values and how they see other people. That gives me a really good sense about whether they will fit on my team.