Mass customization and personalization news

Archive for the 'Crowdsourcing' Category

Links for 25 February

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

1.  Jeff Howe, author of the Crowdsourcing book, has written an interesting and comprehensive blog post about the possible future online business models that might be adopted by the print media.
2.  RPI, a provider of automated, mass-customized manufacturing and fulfillment for the [...]

Contrasting uses of open strategies in the music industry - EMI and Minimum Noise

Monday, January 19th, 2009

The music industry has faced considerable strategic challenges in recent years, not least the trend towards reduced revenues caused by file sharing, but also the shift in market power from labels towards online aggregators such as Apple iTunes. Another side-effect of the world wide web on the music industry has been the trend towards dis-intermediation, [...]

Categories of crowdsourcing and more on whether contributors should be paid

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Since the crowdsourcing phenomenon was first documented during 2006, in a Wired magazine article by Jeff Howe, followed by his book of that name in 2007, the business and technology world has continued to adopt the concept, with varying models and methods.
In some cases, the crowdsourcing model used involved a reward of some kind for [...]

Local Motors joins trend for crowdsourcing car design

Monday, January 12th, 2009

Could 2009 be the year that crowdsourcing takes root in the area of car design? My last 2008 post here described how Caterham, a specialist British sports car maker, is crowdsourcing the design of its next car. In late December, an article in the Boston-based XConomy website described how Local Motors, a startup company in [...]

Caterham to crowdsource design of its next car

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Caterham, the specialist British sports car manufacturer, has launched a crowdsourcing initiative for the design of its next model, in association with PerformancePR, an automotive public relations company.  The project, named Splitwheel, which is described as “a revolutionary online project to design and build a new performance car based on the collective decision-making of its [...]

Customization links for 1 November 2008

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

ZD Net reports that Intel is joining with Asus to create WePC, which serves as a sales site for Asus but is also an effort to gain community input in the PC design process.
Make Your Own Jeans, which provides made-to-measure denim fashions at affordable prices, has announced a new add-on service that allows clients to [...]

CRM at the Speed of Light

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Paul Greenberg, a writer and thought leader in the area of customer relationship management (CRM) has, over the last few months, published extracts on his blog from the fourth edition of his book CRM at the Speed of Light.
The most interesting extract from my viewpoint is from Chapter 6, which describes ‘characteristics of the new [...]

New entrant to crowdsourced T-shirt sector - Yerzies

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

The ranks of online marketplaces for user-designed apparel has been swelled by the arrival of Yerzies. This new company allows anyone to create, purchase or sell their own customized tee shirts, hoodies and other apparel items. In addition to the ability to upload images for printing on a t-shirt or other item of [...]

Design Democracy 08 - Power to the People

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

Custom furniture maker Context Furniture has launched a new website called Design Democracy ’08 – Power to the People, which they describe as a grass roots event aimed at raiseing awareness about mass customization.
This website offers curriculum for DD08 ‘citizens’ (members) to learn about mass customization processes, philosophies, materials, design elements and software/hardware applications.  Most [...]

Book Review: Wikinomics

Monday, September 24th, 2007

Wikinomics, or to use its full title “Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” is a chronicle of how traditional collaboration - in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention centre - has been superceeded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.

The book opens by telling the story of Goldcorp Inc., a mining company [...]

Innovate Us widget from FellowForce presses the button for open innovation

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

A recent post on this site profiled FellowForce, an open innovation project that acts as an intermediary between enterprises and individual innovators. At the time I had noted that the FellowForce website had certain limitations which limited the prospects for success. However, since then FellowForce has made an innovation of its own that [...]

Crowdsourcing of band management gathers momentum

Wednesday, September 5th, 2007

Springwise recently reported on developments involving the new trend of crowdsourced band management, which can also be referred to as ‘crowdfinancing’ as the participants pay a fee for the privilege of being involved in deciding the direction of a band. The first entrant in this new marketplace, Sellaband, recently celebrated its first anniversary. [...]

Economist crowdsources ideas

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

The Economist, a weekly UK magazine that is one of the most influential business publications in the World, recently undertook a project which it described as crowdsourcing but is probably closer in nature to open innovation. The magazine asked its readership what new directions it should take in leveraging its intellectual capital and resources. They [...]

List of Crowdsourcing projects on Openeur

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

The Openeur website, which focuses on open innovation and entrepreneurship, has published a very comprehensive list of projects that use a crowdsourcing methodology, and also related agencies and platforms.  The post adopts a new label for the projects that use crowdsourcing to raise finance for things like managing rock bands or football clubs.  They call [...]

Fellowforce - An ‘Innovation Intermediary’

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

Mikko Ahonen, who runs the Beyond Creativity blog on open innovation, creativity and technology, has posted an interesting evaluation, of Fellowforce, a service that acts as an intermediary between companies and individual innovators or problem solvers.
Fellowforce is a collaboration between Building Better Business, a Dutch organisation that promotes entrepreneurship and a related business [...]