Crowdsourcing on keithrozario.com

Using Captchas on cybertroopers and botnets

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 08:00:01 +0000

Last week I wrote about the ‘rigged’ EDGE poll, that the EDGE had to eventually take down because they suspected someone was trying to bias the results. It was later revealed that a handful of IP addresses were responsible fro the bulk of the votes–presumably the fake ones. An IP address defines a unique internet connection, but not necessarily a unique device. You can try this yourself at home, and connect your PC, Laptop, Tablet and phone to your Wi-Fi router and then go online to check your IP from each–all of your devices will have the same ’external’ IP address.

Pitchin.my Crowdfunding success in Teach a Child to Read

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:00:13 +0000

A couple of months back, I wrote a short post about a Malaysian project that was successfully funded on kickstarter. Today, I can proudly say that Malaysians continue to surprise me in untold ways.

Pitchin.my is the Malaysian kickstarter, and recently it saw a successful funding of a project on it’s website–that literally brought tears to my eyes. The project entitled “Sponsor a Child to Read” was done by an English teacher from a rural school in Negeri Sembilan with a small-ish goal to raise a relatively small-ish USD3000 to provide books to 30 students with low literacy level from SMK Teriang Hilir. Let me tell you, there’s nothing small-ish about teaching 30 students.

Liew Suet Li, the English teacher who started the project, goes on to elaborate that:

Crowdsourcing Week Singapore : Registration and Promo Code

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 16:24:48 +0000

Crowdsourcing has come to the Asia Pacific region--and it's come in a big way. A couple of months back, I was contacted by the people organizing Crowdsourcing week in Singapore to attend the event, unfortunately due to personal commitments I was unable to make it--bummer!

Crowdsourcing week is a great idea that brings a whole bunch of great speakers including Jennifer Gustetic, an executive at the “Challenges and Prizes” program in NASA, Stephanie Grosser from USAID and Sean Moffit from Wikibrands. It’s also one of the first events on crowdsourcing that I know off occurring in the Asia Pacific region and if you’re in the neighbourhood I can almost guarantee it’ll be worth your time attending.

Crowdfunding : Best of Kickstarter 2012

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:00:07 +0000

Crowdfunding is exploding, and kickstarter is exploding with it.

In 2012 alone, Kickstarter successfully helped start 18,109 projects, from pledges of nearly 300 million. That’s a lot of cash from just random strangers hoping to help someone else realize their dreams, or to help the public in general.

Noteworthy projects include an open-source geiger counter to detect radiation levels in Japan, a kickstarter initiative that released recordings of Classical music to the public domain and funding a Bus Stop in Georgia.

Using the Crowds to Predict : Crowdsourcing week article

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 22:06:17 +0000

A couple of days ago, I was invited to blog about crowdsourcing trends for a big event happening in Singapore on the 3rd to 7th of June. It’s called Crowdsourcingweek and if you’re interested in learning more about crowdsourcing there’s a whole boat-load of interesting speakers and events going on–so I definitely encourage you to attend.

The article was about crowd-predicting and how Francis Galton first discovered how crowds could predict (quite accurately) even though the individual members of those crowds had wildly different answers.

Iggyfied successfully kickstarted

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 10:34:14 +0000

A couple of months back, I wrote about I was helping kickstart the brilliant guitarist Igor Presynakov. I was getting a bit worried that this was yet another kickstarter failure, as I had just receive a couple of updates and nothing much else.

But then things got interesting, 2 weeks before Christmas I got a surprise package in the mail, and it was a beautifully packaged crisp IGGYFIED CD. I felt really good supporting a great musician and getting my name on a CD, this also happened to be my very first autographed CD, so all in all it was a good move.

Malaysian kickstarter success story

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 08:00:36 +0000

Just the other day, I walked into an MPH bookstore and saw something that looked oddly familiar. It was a book titled “When I was a kid” and I couldn’t help but think I’ve seen this somewhere. It took me a while, but suddenly it hit me–this was the book from kickstarter.

A couple of months back, I wrote a post for a kickstarter initiative by a friend of mine, in that same post, I touched on some other kickstarter initiative from Malaysians. One of those initiatives was by a guy name boey who wanted to write a rather interesting book based on his life. I remember thinking it to be a really unique style of story telling, and I was really thrilled to see it on shelves in Malaysia–but not just because I’m a book lover.

Kickstarter Malaysia: A collection of Malaysian Kickstarter Projects

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 08:00:46 +0000

Kickstarter is a great crowdfunding platform for budding entrepreneurs, musicians and inventors to get their creations from inside their heads into peoples hands. I personally have funded my favorite youtube guitarist on kickstarter and I should be receiving an album anytime soon--with my name in the credits. How cool is it to get your name printed in the credits of an actual physical CD album--it's amazingly cool.

Initially I thought kickstarter was this once off thing, but over time, the great successes of kickstarter continue to pile up, a couple of months back we had the pebble watch–a e-ink display watch that connected to your iOS or Android phone for display and control. Now we have Ouya an Android based console hoping to compete with the Playstation and XBOX but on a RM300 price-point. This are way cool products, that anyone with even a slight inclination to tech would love to have.

Is MAS updating it's own Wikipedia page?

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 04:26:32 +0000

Continuing my series on bigdata and Google bigquery, I’ve decided to share a rather interesting snippet of information regarding our very own Malaysian Airlines and their wikipedia page.

First, just to illustrate how important Wikipedia is in general, the Malaysian Airlines Wikipedia page gets roughly 30,000 hits per month. That’s just one page of Wikipedia getting more hits than my entire website, I can’t tell you how frustrated that makes me.

Having a negative sounding Wikipedia page is pretty bad for business, particularly if 30,000 potential customers view it every month. That’s a web page that needs some serious attention if you’re the marketing manager of Malaysian Airlines.

Unfortunately for MAS (and every business organization there is), Wikipedia has a policy about updating your own Wikipedia page–you’re not allowed to do it. Wikipedia has to keep to it’s original intention of being an online repository of information that is fair, balanced and neutral. Having marketing gurus or corporate big wigs updating their own Wikipedia entry isn’t exactly in the best intentions of anyone, however Wikipedia doesn’t strictly enforce the policy and leave it up to the crowd.

Fortunately, the crowd have responded, sites like WikiScanner allow users to see which IP addresses updated which Wikipedia articles. Some have gone to the extent of correlating those IP addresses to the owners and determining if companies are updating their own Wikipedia pages against the general guidelines. Let’s see if Malaysian Airlines can join that group of companies who’ve been slapped on the wrist for changing the Wikipedia pages of their organizations.

Wikipedia from a Malaysian perspective

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 04:00:34 +0000

Wikipedia is quite possibly the greatest repository of information mankind has ever seen. It’s built around an amazing concept of allowing anyone the ability to create, document and moderate information in real-time, and so far the concept has proven successful–some may even argue that it’s too successful.

For the past two days, I’ve been writing about Bigquery and Big Data in general, and for the most part I’ve been using the freely available wikipedia dataset in Bigquery to perform some queries and analysis. The results were so interesting, that they warrant a post on their own–and this is that post!

For instance, I was curious who Aiman Abmajid was. For those who aren’t following the blog, Aiman is the undisputed King of Wikipedia in Malaysia. Aiman has single-handedly helped update Malaysian articles on Wikipedia a mind-blowing 13 THOUSAND times–and that’s just the English articles. Almost 6 times more than his closest Malaysian rival.

I was intrigued as to who he was and why was he updating so many Wikipedia entries (some more than 900 times per article), and more I dug the more intriguing it got.

A quick Google search, brought me his Wikipedia which led me to the following:

OpenSource Gold: The greatest Crowdsourcing story ever told

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 08:00:08 +0000

Crowdsourcing is a funny term, and people often ask me what does crowdsourcing have to do with technology, to which I reply–EVERYTHING!

Without the vast internet and communications made possible by it, crowdsourcing would be a fools dream. Right now, I work in an environment so virtual that the first time I met my project manager face to face was last week at a conference, a full 6 months after the project started. It’s a really exciting time, because it allows people to work in a boundary-less world.

The internet and technology enable crowdsourcing, without the internet, there is no crowdsourcing. It gets more interesting because as more and more big world problems emerge, crowdsourcing may become an acceptable way to solve them–all enabled via technology and the internet although crowdsourcing in itself is not technological.

This great video from Don Tapscott (author of wikinomics), really provoked in me some thinking on how we approach data and information.

In about the 4th minute you'll notice Don tell a story of his neighbour, the CEO of Goldcorp and how the crowdsourced the method of Gold Mining. The story is amazing, and be found in detail here and here.

It’s amazing, and here’s how it goes.

The story of the Goldcorp challenge

Instagram Camera: Coolest thing EVER!!

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 17:31:21 +0000

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about a cool card game based on Computer processes, in hindsight the only thing that post proved was that I’m a geek. The card game was funded through a crowdfunded initiative, and that was really what made it cool.

The instagram camera is cool on its own, and the fact that it’s currently being crowdsourced through Indiegogo (a website similar to Kickstarter) makes the cool factor– cucumber cool.

In fact, as of now, it’s already reached $6,000 dollars from it’s $50,000 target in just one day. I’m willing to bet that this project will eventually reach it’s pretty low target of just $50,000 – easily.

There are however, some copyright concerns surrounding the camera, particularly since Facebook now own Instagram and they don’t even like wordpress developers building themes that ’look’ like facebook, much less an entire camera that is based on a trademark they own.

If you choose to fund the project, you’re promised a discount on the final item, which the creator hopes to price at under $350 (that’s in US Dollars). However, based on the specs, that may be a bit difficult, we’re talking about a:

Confirmed: Crowdsourced reviews are better than Professional critics

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 08:31:13 +0000

A study by the Harvard Business School published in april 2012 via it’s online portal HBS Working Knowledge, confirms that “Expert ratings are correlated with Amazon ratings, suggesting that experts and consumers tend to agree in aggregate about the quality of a book. However, there are systematic differences between these sets of reviews.” In layman terms that just means that expert ratings are just as good as the average joe commenting on Amazon. It’s something I’ve suspected all along, that crowdsourced reviews from Amazon, tripadvisor, goodreads and IMDB is just as good as the ‘professional’ reviewer you see in magazines and paid adverts.

The study, which can be downloaded in it’s entirety here, is a really great read, that’s not too technical, but it’s not overly simplistic either so be prepared with some of your high school statistics for this one.

Crowdsourcing Taxi Reviews

Fri, 25 May 2012 20:15:35 +0000

One of the stark differences between Malaysia and Singapore (besides the remarkably better food in Malaysia) are the Taxi Drivers. I used to frequently go to Singapore for business trips and for just about everywhere I went, I chose the taxi, either a friend would help book a comfort cab via their iPhone app, or I’d just call the hotline to book one. I’ve never once been turned down by a Taxi Driver, and I’ve never once had a driver negotiate the price with me. There it was all meters, it was all on the up and up.

In Malaysia however, the situation couldn’t be anymore different, and so its good to see someone (other than the government or Taxi company) trying to help solve the problem by using a smartphone application to crowdsource taxi reviews. On the face of it, the idea is brilliant, have people write reviews of taxis and then collate that data online. It makes it so that ‘bad’ taxi drivers get penalized and ‘good’ taxi drivers are rewarded.

The UK crowdsourced Auditing for MPs : Malaysia Boleh?

Wed, 09 May 2012 14:17:07 +0000

One thing is true of all governments, the most reliable records are Tax records. That is one of the coolest quotes from a very cool movie (which is saying a lot). In V for Vendetta, the heroes try to piece together a puzzle by visiting the tax records to locate some missing information, in real-life we’re also faced with the same problem. No matter how corrupt or bureaucratic you think the government is, there will always be a paper-trail for money and sooner or later someone will find it. The solution for a crony-heavy government was simple, load the system with bureaucracy so no one will find out. The problem was while no ‘one’ may have found out, a group of inspired citizens armed with nothing more than a proper system can troll down all the bureaucratic walls you can build.

A couple of years ago, the Guardian newspaper set out to go through all the tax and expense claims of every single member of parliament. While the fallout from the reports were clear, less publicity was given to the actual method that the newspaper used. People naturally assumed that when the news read “Guardian reports MP claims….” , that a regular journalist working for the paper trolled through some documentation and arrived at the results. Usually the assumption includes a snarly eyed journalist with big black thick-framed glasses, gulping down gallons of coffee while his tie came loose, just an assumption of course.

Igor Presnyakov succeeds in getting kickstart-ed

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 16:44:21 +0000

Now some say he lives in Amsterdam and lives only on cheese,that may be fiction but damnit this guy is the best guitarist I’ve seen. Check out Igor’s rendition of Canon from the youtube embed above and you’ll know what I’m talking about, or just head on over to youtube and check out the countless songs he’s played on youtube including sweet child of mine or someone like you. It’s absolutely amazing guitar playing, and it’s all posted on youtube by Igor himself, for you to enjoy…for Free!!

Using the crowd to predict the future

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:45:45 +0000

I just finished Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe, the definitive book on crowdsourcing, and although it was written nearly 4 years ago, I was really bowled over by key insights throughout the book. Crowdsourcing is more than just the design work or iStockphoto, there’s also an offshoot into the world of Crowd-predicting. Utilizing the wisdom of the crowds to predict anything from sports results, Hollywood sales or even Presidential elections, and it appears these prediction markets actually do a pretty good job of predicting the correct outcome. They’re not right 100% of the time (then again neither are the experts), but overall the Crowds can –and do–predict with great accuracy.

The premise of crowd-predicting is simple. Get a whole bunch of people together and then ask them to predict the outcome of a particular event, once each individual prediction comes through you then aggregate that information to get the final result. Proponents of crowd-predicting say this result often beats the ’experts’, and they have some data to back it up.

Can we use crowdsourcing for Autistic people?

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:12:17 +0000

Yesterday, a doctor by the name of Sandra posted a comment on my blog about how she thought crowdsourcing could help disabled people particularly those with bipolar disorders get jobs online. If anyone in the crowd can contribute to a crowdsourcing initiative then even those with bipolar disorders should be able to do it, and they should be paid the same amount. It got me thinking about an article I read in the New York Times some months back on a non-profit startup called AspireTech was actually getting work for autistic adults not ‘despite’ them being autistic but because they were autistic. Autistic people are generally able to perform the same repetitive task over and over again without losing focus or getting lethargic, and they’re way more adapt at this than the rest of the general population.

This fundamental advantage they have makes them perfect for roles as software testers and even programmers. I always dread testing anything, especially when it’s doing the same thing over and over again, let try uploading a 5MB file, now a 10MB file, now a 100MB file…on and on and on. These test provide critical data for any software project but can be very very cumbersome to accomplish since they require repetitive work to be done over and over again with minimal variance. At least it’s hard for me to do, particularly since my wife says I’m not too good with instructions.Individual with autism are extremely adapt at this and they’ve proven their worth. In these areas autism is an asset not a liability.

How much do you trust Google?

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:14:46 +0000

I basically live on Google servers, the first sites I visit when I wake up are Google Mail and Google Reader, without these two sites I’m basically lost. I seldom log on to facebook anymore and twitter may keep me occupied for about an hour, but after that I need my fix of Google. Google is such an integral part of our lives, in fact since 70% of my readers come here via a Google search, chances are you wouldn’t be here reading this very post right now–without Google.

The question then becomes how much do we trust Google? Have we really thought about trusting Google given how much we rely on it. Think about it if Google were to go down, where would you go for more information. Chances are you’d head on over to bing, take bing away and you start having problems.

How do you search for search engines, when you don’t know any??

Why ReCaptcha works: The 4 requirements of Crowdsourcing

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 18:34:31 +0000

If the 5 of you can’t decide where to eat lunch without saying the dreaded words “up to you”, how in world can 100,000 or even 1 million people combine together to solve a problem? The answer is through a mixture of the right collaborative systems enabled by the right technology and people with the right skill-sets motivated by the right things. Get all 4 components right, and you’ve got yourself the answer to any problem.

However, getting these 4 components right is very very tricky.Some might argue it’s more difficult than solving the task at hand, but a handful of successful crowdsourcing projects have broken the mold and set the tone for others to follow. Today I want to focus on what is quite possibly the biggest crowdsourcing project ever, and with the exception of wikipedia is probably the most successful as well. ReCaptcha.

The Ugly side of crowdsourcing

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:11:27 +0000

Crowdsourcing seems to the buzz these days, with LG crowdsourcing a cellphone design off crowdsourcing website crowdspring and starbucks receiving more than 17,000 coffee ideas of the web from their crowdsourcing platform mystarbucksidea.com. However, as with all new trends there are detractors and with crowdsourcing the number of detractors seems to be growing each day.

Previously I blogged about the wide spectrum of crowdsourcing , from the low end and mundane on Amazons Mechanical Turk, to the high end and niche Crowdspring. However, when a detractor to the term includes wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, then it’s time to study this a bit more in depth. So what is the ugly side of crowdsourcing and what does it strike a nerve with Jimmy Wales…and just about every designer I know.

Find out who missed call you...

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 15:44:50 +0000

Social media and sites like twitter have done fantastically well to enable to arab uprising or finding bone marrow donors. However, a group of people decided to use social media to answer some fundamentally important question , or rather just one very important question…who missed call me?

The web site (very aptly named) whocallsme.com allows user to post up missed calls from numbers they don’t recognize and people with similar calls usually try to respond. The response rate is pretty good although it mostly focuses on calls from credit agencies (quite obvious once you think about it)

Crowdsourcing used to identify UK rioters

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 21:05:10 +0000

The recent events in the UK while tragic have unveiled some new uses for crowdsourcing. Some time ago people used Google Wave (now called Apache Wave) to help find a criminal murder suspect, which was amazing news if you ask me, but it still didn’t save Google Wave. Now however, the guys over at a website called Zavilia had a brilliant idea of using crowdsourcing to solve the London rioting problem, the premise was simple, users would upload photos of the looters and rioters and those photos would then be posted online. Each rioter would be labled with an alphabet, and finally other users could check out the pictures and begin identifying anyone they knew…brilliant solution. Personally, I can’t imagine solving this problem without crowdsourcing, and it just goes to show that in the future we will solve problems together via collaboration on a massive scale rather than a few geniuses leading the way.

The guys over at zavilia have shutdown their website claiming:

The development of Zavilia: Identify UK Rioters has been temporarily paused due to a decrease in traffic and in user interactions. However, we fully intend to continue development at some point in the near future.
Which is sad, but you could take a look at the version that was up @ http://www.zavilia.com/identify/
Amazing.

Crowdsourcing: The way of the future?

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:49:31 +0000

So you heard about Crowdsourcing from a TED talk you just watched online, and now you’re wondering what Crowdsourcing is. Well here’s the lowdown, Crowdsourcing is a phenomena where ultra rich companies rely on many lowly underpaid serfs to gather data, process it and then produce a result where the ultra rich companies can then use to make them richer…well in not so many words of course, but obviously I’m joking.

Jokes aside, Crowdsourcing is a pretty cool thing, it’s getting the wisdom of the crowd in your decision making process and relying on the fact that many people working together can produce much better results one single person or organization can. Think of crowdsourcing as brainstorming with an unlimited number of people, and where anyone can join (and leave) the group providing you the influx (and reflux) of ideas necessary to produce truly lateral thinking.

Twitter vs. News: How they reported the Oslo bombing

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 17:23:11 +0000

Working for a Multinational company means I have colleagues from all over the globe, some of whom I’ve developed a friendly relationship with, friendly enough to ‘friend’ them on facebook. Today I received the tragic news of the Oslo bombings not from CNN or BBC, not even from the Google news, but over a facebook status update from a colleague of mine in Norway. The sad news of such an atrocity was heart-wrenching, but in the midst of this I decided to do a small study to see how twitter was reporting the news as opposed to the usual mainstream internet news companies.

So going online I searched twitter for Norway and saw the very first tweet on the list, a condolence message from BO himself: