Platforms & Crowds
With the power to transform established industries, capture untapped value, and materialize new business models, perhaps no aspect of the digital economy is as transformative as the possibilities presented by the platform economy and the utilization of crowds.A guide to nature in the age of Instagram
In March of this year, California was host to a spectacular sight: one of the greatest super blooms in years. Lake Elsinore (halfway between LA and San Diego) was so alight in poppies that the incredible blooms could even be seen from space. It was an Instagrammer’s paradise… and everyone knew it. Within days, the […]
The curation of collective intelligence
There’s a classic story about a statistician who, while at a county fair, happens upon a competition to guess the butchered weight of an ox. He compared individual guesses with the median guess of the crowd and found that while individual estimates varied widely, the group as a whole came within 1% from the ox’s […]
Do the Uber and Lyft IPOs signal the coming of age of the gig economy?
Upwork went first. The talent network that matches freelancers with companies made its initial public offering (IPO) in October 2018. Upwork’s IPO was the first “gig economy” business to go public. Next came Lyft in March. The Lyft IPO gained a lot of momentum, despite the fact the company has yet to yield a profit. […]
When online harassment doesn’t follow the rules
Is there a ‘cost’ to online harassment? Is it quantifiable? Beyond the toll it weighs on human victims, the rampant toxicity we see across social networks and communities, does this toxicity affect the bottom line of social networks? Well, in December 2018, Amnesty International released a robust report on online harassment against women politicians and […]
“Lost in Space:” can the crowd help NASA find items on the International Space Station?
It may seem hard to believe, but even astronauts lose track of things! In the closed environment of the International Space Station (ISS) there are only so many places equipment and personal items can be stored. So NASA reached out to LISH to run a crowdsource contest to improve on the existing state of the art inventory tracking system.