 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Design |
| Founded | May 2007 |
| Founder |
|
| Headquarters | Chicago, Illinois, USA |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Products | Custom Logo Design, Website Design, Illustration, Marketing Materials, Industrial Design, Copywriting |
Number of employees | 70 [1] |
| Website | www.crowdspring.com |
Crowdspring (written "crowdSPRING", legally crowdSPRING, LLC) is an online marketplace for crowdsourced creative services. [2]
Crowdspring was co-founded in May 2007 by Ross Kimbarovsky and Michael Samson. [3] Crowdspring launched its online marketplace publicly in May 2008. Crowdspring is based in Chicago. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
More than 200,000 graphic designers and writers from 200 countries work on Crowdspring. [10]
Crowdspring maintains a blog which was launched in mid-2008. [11]
Crowdspring has faced ongoing criticism regarding its speculative business model, which involves asking designers and writers to submit completed work with no guarantee of payment unless their submission is selected. [12] Critics argue that this practice can result in many contributors effectively working without compensation, despite Crowdspring collecting fees from clients. [13]
In some cases, participants have expressed frustration with delayed or missing payments, further fueling criticism about fairness and transparency on the platform. [14] Crowdspring has responded to such feedback by stating that they provide a global platform to connect creatives with businesses and offer opportunities to grow their portfolios. [15]
Rakuten Group, Inc. is a Japanese technology conglomerate based in Tokyo, founded by Hiroshi Mikitani in 1997. Centered around the online retail marketplace Rakuten Ichiba, its businesses include financial services utilizing Fintech, digital content and communications services such as the messaging app Viber, e-book distributor Kobo, and Japan's fourth-most used mobile carrier, Rakuten Mobile. Rakuten has more than 28,000 employees worldwide, operating in 30 countries and regions, and its revenues totalling US $12.8 billion as of 2021. Rakuten was the official sponsor of the Spanish football club FC Barcelona from 2017 until 2022, and the Golden State Warriors of the NBA as of 2022. It is sometimes referred to as the "Amazon of Japan".
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing website with which businesses can hire remotely located "crowdworkers" to perform discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do as economically. It is operated under Amazon Web Services, and is owned by Amazon. Employers, known as requesters, post jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), such as identifying specific content in an image or video, writing product descriptions, or answering survey questions. Workers, colloquially known as Turkers or crowdworkers, browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a fee set by the requester. To place jobs, requesters use an open application programming interface (API), or the more limited MTurk Requester site. As of April 2019, requesters could register from 49 approved countries.
User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), emerged from the rise of intelligent web services which allow everyday users to create content, such as images, videos, audio, text, testimonials, and software and interact with other users. Online content aggregation platforms such as social media, discussion forums and wikis by their interactive and social nature, no longer produce multimedia content but provide tools to produce, collaborate, and share a variety of content, which can affect the attitudes and behaviors of the audience in various aspects. This transforms the role of consumers from passive spectators to active participants.
Etsy, Inc. is an American e-commerce company with an emphasis on the selling of handmade or vintage items and craft supplies. These items fall under a wide range of categories, including jewelry, bags, clothing, home decor, religious items, furniture, toys, art, as well as craft supplies and tools. Items described as vintage must be at least 20 years old. The site follows in the tradition of open craft fairs, giving sellers personal storefronts where they list their goods for a fee of US$0.20 per item. Beginning in 2013, Etsy allowed sellers to sell mass-manufactured items.
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is not limited to online activity, however, and there are various historical examples of crowdsourcing. The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing". In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.
An online marketplace is a type of e-commerce website where product or service information is provided by multiple third parties. Online marketplaces are the primary type of multichannel ecommerce and can be a way to streamline the production process.
Trustpilot Group plc, is a Danish consumer business operating a review website founded in Denmark in 2007 which hosts reviews of businesses worldwide. Nearly 1 million new reviews are posted each month. The site offers freemium services to businesses. It has been criticised for the publication of fake reviews, and allowing companies to remove negative reviews. Trustpilot is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
Upserve, originally Swipely, provides a restaurant management platform which allows independent full-service restaurants to run and manage their entire business. The Platform is made up of restaurant-specific point of sale (POS) software, payments, and analytics, online ordering, loyalty, and marketing tools designed specifically for restaurants. At the center of the Upserve Platform is the cloud-based Upserve POS, a point of sale system that Upserve acquired from Groupon in 2016.
RocketHub was an online crowdfunding platform launched in 2010, its first use was September 1, 2009. Based in New York City, its users included musicians, entrepreneurs, scientists, game developers, philanthropists, filmmakers, photographers, theatre producers/directors, writers, and fashion designers. Users posted fundraising campaigns to it to raise funds and awareness for projects and endeavors. Operating in over 190 countries, RocketHub was once considered one of America's largest crowdfunding platforms.
Fiverr is an Israeli multinational online marketplace for freelance services. Fiverr's connects freelancers to people or businesses looking for services. Fiverr takes its name from the $5 asking price attached to all tasks when the company was founded, though many sellers now charge more.
Throughout history, architects have often been chosen by setting up an architectural competition and awarding the commission on the basis of the most favoured design. With the advent of the internet, a similar process has been set up by a number of businesses offering small-scale competitions for mainly domestic projects. Like an architectural competition, contributors must register but their designs are judged anonymously, and only the winning design is paid a fee.
Udemy, Inc. is an education technology company, founded in May 2010 by Eren Bali, Gagan Biyani, and Oktay Caglar. It is based in San Francisco, California, United States, with hubs in Denver, Dublin, Austin, Melbourne, Istanbul, and Gurgaon.
Jade Magnet was an online crowdsourcing platform for creative and marketing support services based in Bangalore, India. It was founded in 2009 by Sitashwa Srivastava and Manik Kinra. The company has white label partnerships in Qatar as Mixilion and in Singapore as id8on.
Crowdsourcing software development or software crowdsourcing is an emerging area of software engineering. It is an open call for participation in any task of software development, including documentation, design, coding and testing. These tasks are normally conducted by either members of a software enterprise or people contracted by the enterprise. But in software crowdsourcing, all the tasks can be assigned to or are addressed by members of the general public. Individuals and teams may also participate in crowdsourcing contests.
Government crowdsourcing is a form of crowdsourcing employed by governments to better leverage their constituents' collective knowledge and experience. It has tended to take the form of public feedback, project development, or petitions in the past, but has grown to include public drafting of bills and constitutions, among other things. This form of public involvement in the governing process differs from older systems of popular action, from town halls to referendums, in that it is primarily conducted online or through a similar IT medium.
VentureCrowd is an Australian multi asset class crowdfunding platform, headquartered in Sydney, including equity crowdfunding, property crowdfunding and debt-based crowdfunding. VentureCrowd completed the largest Australian equity crowdfunding raise, $4.2 million, for taxi-booking and payment software company Ingogo in May 2015. This deal is ranked 8th on the List of highest funded equity crowdfunding projects. This deal is ranked 8th on the List of highest funded equity crowdfunding projects. In June 2016, VentureCrowd raised more than $900,000 for a Western Sydney residential project - a 35-lot development in Riverstone East, in partnership with the property developer ClearState. In August 2016, a second project raised $1,700,000 for a 44-lot development project in Austral.
Raise.com is an e-commerce platform owned and operated by Raise that enables third-party individuals to sell Gift Cards on a fixed-price online marketplace alongside Raise's regular offerings. The company is based in Chicago, Illinois, and was launched in 2013 by founder George Bousis, who still remains the Executive Chairman and CEO.
99designs is a Melbourne, Australia, based company that operates a freelancer platform for connecting graphic designers and clients. The company was founded in 2008, and has a United States office in Oakland, California.
Visible Service LLC, doing business as Visible by Verizon, and known simply as Visible, is an American all-digital prepaid mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) and brand wholly-owned by Verizon. Launched in 2018, the carrier offers services on the Verizon network, with all services delivered via e-commerce and mobile apps using generative artificial intelligence, and no brick and mortar retail presence. Visible competes against T-Mobile's Metro by T-Mobile, AT&T's Cricket Wireless, and EchoStar's Boost Mobile in the major carrier prepaid segment.