Author Archives: Ville Miettinen

About Ville Miettinen

Wili is a serial entrepreneur and technologist. He’s been programming since the early 80′s, and has his made career in high-tech in the field of 3D computer graphics. Wili is a world traveller and a semi-professional photographer. Wili is the CEO of Microtask.

Space Peas and Holy Toast: Why Pattern Recognition is Humanity’s Killer App

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Ville Miettinen

SharePeople are strange. We look for faces and animals in clouds, we spot Michael Jackson in a greasy roasting dish, and we pay tens of thousands of dollars for pieces of toast that resemble the Virgin Mary (personally, I think it looks more like Michael Jackson, but I admit that I am not a qualified [...]

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My advice to Newt: use the crowd

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Ville Miettinen

ShareEver since he exploded onto our screens as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, it was clear (at least to 8 year olds like me) that Newt Gingrich would one day go places. True to my (utterly fictitious) predictions, if you read the news at the moment there is no escaping him and his good [...]

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Banking on one another: Can the crowd save itself from the banks?

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Ville Miettinen

ShareFirst they lend too much, cause a financial meltdown and need bailing out. Now they don’t lend enough (unless share-options and fat bonuses count as lending). As any former Wall St inhabitant, election-year politician or self-respecting Hollywood celebrity will tell you: banks are pure evil. Personally, I quite like the banking system as a whole. [...]

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Food52: a recipe for crowdsourcing success?

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Ville Miettinen

ShareTake the following ingredients: . Two award-winning cookery writers. . One eager food-loving crowd. . A sprinkling of game mechanics. Mix them all together and what do get? Answer: Food52. Founded in 2009 by New York Times journalists Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, the site is described as a “social hub for people who love [...]

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Confidence tricks: can crowdsourcing keep our feet on the ground?

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Ville Miettinen

ShareCharles Darwin once wrote that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Despite how far society has progressed since this was written, it seems as relevant now as it ever was. Whether it’s refusing to stop and ask for directions because we’re sure we know the right way (only to find ourselves lost in [...]

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