Crowdsourcing In Lieu of Outsourcing

The last couple of decades have seen a trend toward outsourcing versus traditional hiring to meet business needs. Coming out of the Great Recession, there is an even newer concept starting to pick up steam. It’s called crowdsourcing. Why not tap the power of the crowd when you have a specific task that needs a solution?

Crowdsourcing is a distributed approach to problem solving. You normally think of handing a task to a specific employee or to a manager who will delegate it to a particular employee. In lieu of that, you can go out and bring in a temp or contract employee or forget the employment model completely and hire an outside firm to do the work. If you want to sell a building, you contract with a real estate agent. If you want to build a building you contract with an architect and general building contractor.

Crowdsourcing works something like contracting with a local firm except that the world is your marketplace. Many tasks like web design, logo design, artwork, article writing, app development and so on don’t require someone located nearby. Pretty much anything you can do on a computer can be done anywhere on Earth. On the network, the home office in Beijing is just as close as the corporate office down the hall.

Isn’t this just another form of outsourcing? It is, but on a micro scale and with interesting payment options. What I’m describing is farming out your tasks to individuals and crowds, not setting up your own shop to get cheaper labor overseas or partnering with a major corporation as a service provider.

When you go out for services locally, you probably start with the Yellow Pages or an online directory equivalent. You pick from who’s available in the area so you can meet with them in person to describe the assignment, write the contract and review the progress & results. When you go out for services online you do lose the ability to press the flesh or get your hand around somebody’s throat - literally. But if you can get comfortable doing business without the physical contact, you open up a world of new opportunities - literally!

The biggest enabler for online contracting or crowdsourcing is having a marketplace were buyers and sellers can meet. It’s a lot less dicey than trying to conduct business in forums and chats. Fortunately there is a very large and established marketplace already available with 6 million members worldwide. It’s called Witmart. They’ve got the resources and the tools that make it easy for service providers and clients to hook up successfully.

Here’s where the crowdsourcing idea comes in. You have the usual option to offer a job on a contract basis where you specify qualifications, negotiate the reward, job content and completion date and then pay upon completion. But you also have the option to make a contest out it. You specify the job and the amount of the reward and let the marketplace have at it. You then pick from best solution or solutions and release the reward to the winner or winners.

Where does the contest approach work best? It’s for things like logo design, business card designs, website design, marketing slogans, promotions, and so on. These jobs need quick solutions, don’t demand a lot of time and effort, and the value of diverse perspectives is an asset.

Contracting is more suitable for bigger jobs that require lots of time and effort, need considerable communication and coordination and have many specific requirements. Often the work is done in stages with payment released based on meeting milestones.

Do you occasionally or regularly need to find someone to build a website, translate documents, develop an iPhone App, promote a brand or come up with a company logo and find it a big hassle? Your life could get a lot easier right now by checking out the freelance marketplace with verified high quality providers at Witmart.

Symmetrical Internet Providers

Most people who use the Internet are consumers, not producers of content. The mix of content has migrated from largely text to largely images and streaming video over the last couple of decades. Even so, the connection arrangement for broadband Internet access has remained asymmetrical with bandwidth in the downward direction 5 to 10 times that provided in the upload direction.

Why is that the setup? Think about how you access the Web on a PC, tablet or smartphone. It almost always involves selecting some content to read or view. The selection process is a matter of mouse clicks or keyboard entry. Those are pretty low bandwidth activities. The viewing of the results or the acquisition of a file is just the opposite. A server assembles those results and delivers fairly large pages consisting of text, graphics, photo images and perhaps video. All of that material comprises a lot of bytes and needs a considerable bandwidth to deliver in any reasonable time.

Since bandwidth is a scarce commodity, relatively speaking, there is a noticeable cost involved in providing the wireline or wireless channel for transport. There is no point in provisioning a fast upload link if it is only going to be lightly used. It’s download that customers value and demand as much as they can get for their broadband dollar.

Social media is changing the mix of upload and download requirements. When most of us were web page readers, the low bandwidth upload and high bandwidth download channels were the obvious setup. Today, many more users are creators as well as consumers of content. They post to blogs and Facebook. They upload photos and videos as well as download them. New applications like VoIP telephony and video conferencing consume equal amounts of bandwidth in both directions. The pressure on service providers is for more upload bandwidth as well as download bandwidth.

Businesses have had the symmetrical bandwidth requirement for a long time. It’s the businesses that run those servers that provide content to their customers. Large files going to the server need lots of bandwidth. There may be more email flowing out of a business than into it. Some businesses are providing streaming video content to the Internet and consume more bandwidth in the upload direction than the download direction. Cloud services have heavy traffic moving in both directions.

Right now, your choices in Internet bandwidth services can be divided into symmetrical and asymmetrical categories. Symmetrical means that upload and download speeds are the same. Asymmetrical means one direction is much faster than the other. That’s almost always the download stream.

Traditional telecom services are symmetrical. They were developed by the telephone industry and later adapted for transporting data. Telephone is inherently two-way with no difference in the amount of traffic flowing in one direction versus the other. If you order a T1 line, Ethernet over Copper, DS3 connection or OC-3 fiber optic service, you will get symmetrical bandwidth by default.

Symmetrical bandwidth services also tend to be dedicated Internet services, abbreviated DIA for Dedicated Internet Access. What does dedicated mean? It means that the bandwidth is assigned exclusively for your use. A 10 Mbps EoC Internet service gives you 10 Mbps in both directions, called 10 x 10 Mbps, anytime you want to use it. Any bandwidth you don’t need at the moment sits idle until you do.

Symmetrical bandwidth services are often covered by Service Level Agreements or SLAs. These agreements spell out the technical characteristics of the line, such as bandwidth, jitter, latency and packet loss. They also define such things as MTTR or Mean TIme To Repair for any outages that might occur. There are generally remedies available, like refunds on your bill, if the service provider can’t deliver to the terms of the SLA.

Asymmetrical bandwidth services are generally targeted toward consumers where price is far more important than performance. The bandwidth is shared among multiple users, not dedicated to you alone. That means that your download and upload speeds will vary depending on how many others are trying to use the service at the same time. Instead of SLAs, asymmetrical services are provided on a “best effort” basis that lacks any guarantees.

There’s quite a difference in price and performance between symmetrical and asymmetrical bandwidth services. Which is right for your business? Get prices and features from business broadband Internet providers to compare options and select the best match for your company needs.