Tag Archives: Mark Zuckerberg


Predicting the Facebook IPO: The crowd gets it wrong

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Ville Miettinen

An excess of confidence can be a dangerous thing. As Mark Zuckerberg ponders the jagged descent of Facebook’s share price and industry analysts scramble to explain the social network’s woes, the aura of optimism that heralded the Facebook IPO has evaporated.

So how did it all go so wrong? One clue may lie in the crowdsourced prediction site FacebookIPODayClosingPrice.com. The site was created in response to a suggestion by venture …

Tags: Chris Sacca crowdsourcing Facebook Facebook IPO FacebookIPODayClosingPrice.com Initial public offering Mark Zuckerberg microtask microwork Prediction Twitter

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Google Ngrams: in the beginning was the word search

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Ville Miettinen

… to use.

Nowadays, the big-friendly-search-giant sometimes seems more interested in irritating Mark Zuckerberg than promoting universal knowledge. But, just occasionally, Google gets back to basics.

In 2004 Google started digitizing books. Since then, 15 million volumes have been digitized by OCR software into Google’s virtual library. Recently, Harvard scholars Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel decided to try and turn this literary data-mountain into something “useful …

Tags: Android crowd crowdsourcing google Google Labs Harvard University Mark Zuckerberg microwork Million Book Project new york times TED

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Facing the future: Will we all work for Mark one day?

Posted on September 16, 2010 by Ville Miettinen

… Facebook, which is more intent on developing its services than monetizing them. In October 2008, Zuckerberg said “ I don’t think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did… In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is. But that is not our primary focus today. ”

Although profits do not necessarily dictate fortunes (look at Wikipedia), it seems fair to assume that if Facebook could profit fully from the size of its user base, its …

Tags: crowdsourcing crowdsourcing platform distributed work Facebook Facebook business model Mark Zukeberg microtask Moneybook Myspace social Twitter

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Designed intelligence: how experts can help the crowd

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Ville Miettinen

… to predict global events, some of its own experts are questioning whether this is a good idea. Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA and State Department analyst, provides a snappy argument to me and my fellow crowd-evangelists: “Crowds produce riots. Experts produce wisdom.”

The CIA’s project uses a modified version of the wisdom of crowds effect called Aggregative Contingent Estimation. While this may sound like a classic CIA euphemism the process is actually a carefully …

Tags: Aggregative Contingent Estimation Central Intelligence Agency CIA crowdsourcing Gary Gygax intelligence Mark Lowenthal microtask microwork State Department Wisdom of Crowds

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Crowdsourcing the slums: a breath of fresh air?

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Ville Miettinen

… why it stinks that so many people in the world do not have access to it.

Intrepid PhD student Mark Iliffe has been doing his best to do something about this in the slums of Kenya and Tanzania, using – you guessed it – crowdsourcing.

How do you say “where’s the WC?”

Mark’s scheme, The Tandale Mapping Project, aims to map sanitation services in the fast-growing, chronically under-resourced urban slums of Dar es Salaam. Armed only with integrity, an OpenStreetMap …

Tags: crowd crowdsourcing Dar es Salaam Doctor of Philosophy Global Positioning System Mark OpenStreetMap Swahili language Tanzania Ushahidi

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