The power of the masses: part of the briefing trendwatching.com "8 trends in 2008"

The final part of the big briefing " 8 trends of 2008 ". We describe the crowd-trend in general and some of its subtrends in particular. In order not to abuse the transliteration or transcription of foreign words, we (cornflake.ru) dubbed the crowd-trend “the force of the masses”. This concept includes all subtrends that have the crowd-prefix in the English version: crowdfunding (funding by the masses), crowdsourcing (almost any work done by the forces of the masses), crowdbuying (buying a large batch of any product made by a mass of people, persons by prior agreement ”). Before we go into the details of the development of this trend in 2008, let's look at some examples of its manifestation in 2007. SellaBand is a great example of collective funding (crowdfunding). The principle of the resource: novice musicians post their creations on the site, the audience listens to them, and buys shares in the future financial success of the favorite performers. As soon as USD 50.000 appears in the group's “piggy bank”, SellaBand organizes a recording for it in a professional studio. The result of this recording - an album or composition - is put up for sale, and the revenues from this sale and related advertising are divided (in particular) between the performer and the “believers” (this is how realtors are called in SellaBand). And things are going: not so long ago, "believers" in the teams of Cubworld , Nemesea , Second Person and Maitreya received the first dividends on their investments. According to SellaBand, this profit will be enough for each of the investors except for a beer in a bar (for themselves and for friends). However, this is not so important. The important thing is that the idea works. In addition, advertising revenues should grow soon - SellaBand is working on contracts with a number of media agencies located outside Holland, the USA and the UK (these three countries are initially the main markets of the company). Let's see what their progress will be in 2008. Recently, MyFootballClub , an English project launched in May 2007, announced its intention to acquire a controlling stake in Ebbsfleet United Football Club. The name of the company (although it is not very clear whether it can be called a company) literally translates as “My Football Club”. In less than three months, 50,000 people became members of this club, each of whom paid GBP 35 as an entrance fee. This amount pays for the opportunity to participate (along with other members of the club) in choosing a football team, its purchase and management. All important decisions - buying players, transfers, etc. - voted on. When it came to buying the team, 9 football clubs immediately turned to MyFootballClub. Some of them were refused because they had too much debt or played only at the regional level. One of the reasons for buying shares of Ebbsfleet United is that this team has a good chance of getting into the national football league. Well, time will tell. Zopa and Prosper - pioneers in the field of peer-to-peer lending ( P2P lending , social lending) - continue to increase turnover. Peering loans are good old “borrow money”, with the difference that transactions can occur between completely strangers. And the borrower will have to pay interest. The advantage of peer to peer lending is more flexible terms and lower interest rates. No banks and similar intermediaries. Scheme of work: borrowers place on the website the desired parameters of the loan and fill out a personal profile, and lenders make their offers. The one who offers the lowest interest rate wins. Lenders minimize their risks by offering money to several borrowers at once. According to the study of the Online Banking Report, by 2011 the volume of peering loans in the United States could exceed 100,000 loans per year - more than USD 1,000,000,000 (one billion). Unlike online auction site eBay, which reduces buyers and sellers from around the world, peer-to-peer lending is limited, as a rule, only by local financial laws. Let us return to the power of the masses. The collective creation of products, financing, purchasing, design, management - the realization of anything by the forces of the masses - is an already established phenomenon. But in 2008, the masses will not just be involved in solving problems: from these masses, rough diamonds and real diamonds will be mined (to put it figuratively). How to do it? To fill them (diamonds and diamonds) with love, respect and, of course, big money. Below are two examples from Netflix and Google. Netflix , a DVD movie rental site , is ready to pay USD 1,000,000 to the best “soothsayer”. No, we are not talking about astrology. Netflix is ​​looking for a person / team who will be able to beat Cinematch, a Netflix system that recommends users to movies based on the choices they made earlier. This is what is written on this site : “Netflix gives people the opportunity to watch movies that they like. To help clients find such films, we developed Cinematch. There are many more interesting (alternative Cinematch) prediction methods. But we are wondering if at least one of these methods can give the best result? To find the answer to this question, we decided to organize a competition. Everything is very simple. If you manage to create a system that will work at least 10% better than Cinematch, you will get a lot of money and the opportunity to show off. But for this (yes, yes, it wasn’t a trick, you were expecting it, right?) You’ll have to share this method with us and tell everyone how you created this system and why it works. In order to maintain interest, in addition to the main prize, we also offer intermediate annual prizes of USD 50,000 dollars. This money is paid for the duration of the competition. The interim prize goes to the one whose system will demonstrate the greatest increase in forecasting accuracy over the previous year. No increase in accuracy - no prize. ” To make the competition progress transparent, progress can be tracked on the leaderboard. At the moment, more than 27,000 people from 161 countries participated in the competition, and the KorBell team became the winner and recipient of the amount of USD 50,000 in 2007. These specialists have developed a system whose prediction accuracy is 8.43% higher than the accuracy of Cinematch. They came close enough to the 10% mark, but did not reach it, so the main prize in USD 1,000,000 is still waiting for its owner. Google, the most prominent member of the Open Handset Alliance , is working on the Android project: the first full-fledged, open (as open source) and free platform for developing applications used in mobile devices. In order to stimulate the work of programmers from around the world, Google organized a contest, the prize fund of which is USD 10.000.000. At the end of the first stage of the competition (development accepted from January 2 to March 3, 2008) 50 participants will receive USD 25,000 for further application development. After that, each of these 50 will have the opportunity to win one of 10 prizes of USD 275,000 and USD 100,000 dollars. So ... Think about what task your business can solve by the forces of the masses (or individual "diamond" representatives), and how much you are willing to pay for it. The previous parts of the briefing can be found by interested parties
here , here , here , here , here , here and here .