List of crowdsourcing projects

Below is a list of projects that rely on crowdsourcing. See also open innovation.

A

• Adaptive Vehicle Make is a project overseen by DARPA to crowdsource the design and manufacture of a new armoured vehicle.

• AED4 allows members of the public to register locations of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) online, to enable a nearby AED to be quickly located during an emergency using the AED4.US iPhone app (Radboud University Nijmegen).

• In 2005, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform on which crowdsourcing tasks called "HITs" (Human Intelligence Tasks") can be created and publicized and people can execute the tasks and be paid for doing so. Dubbed "Artificial Artificial Intelligence", it was named after The Turk, an 18th century chess-playing "machine".

• The first crowd sourced documentary film is the non-profit "The American Revolution," which went into production in 2005, and which examines the role media played in the cultural, social and political changes from 1968 to 1974 through the story of underground, free-form radio station WBCN-FM in Boston. When the project began, by seeking archival contributions from the public, the term "crowd source" was not in use, and so the film was referred to as the "first open source documentary film." The film is being produced by Lichtenstein Creative Media and the non-profit Filmmakers Collaborative.

• In 2010, SURVICE Engineering launched beta testing of ARGUS, a system that uses vessels of opportunity for the autonomous collection and processing of crowd source bathymetry data. ARGUS interfaces with existing GPS and depth sounding equipment on the vessels, and uses wireless technology (WiFi, cellular, and satellite) for automatic offloading to a centralized server. Here the data is corrected for static and dynamic offsets and environmental effects such as tide, then collectively processed to provide current water depths for the transited waterways. Through 2011, ARGUS had processed 20 million depth soundings covering 200 square kilometers of U.S. East and Gulf Coast waterways.

• Article One Partners, founded in 2008, is a community of technology experts who execute crowdsourced prior art search by researching and contributing information related to patents. By submitting research to the online platform, the community members compete for cash rewards, ranging from $5,000 to $50,000.
• ARTigo is an online gaming platform providing several GWAPs, among other conceived for this platform, with the aim to supply artworks with tags provided by the University of Munich, Germany, to automatically build up an artwork search engine, to scientifically investige artworks' reception, and finally to provide an artwork learning environment: The users learn about art while playing the various games offered on the platform.
• Australian Historic Newspapers provided by the National Library of Australia encourages members of the public to correct/fix up/improve the electronically translated (OCR) text of old newspapers. This means the full-text search capability is instantly improved for everyone. The service was released in August 2008 and by March 2010 over 12 million lines of text had been improved by thousands of public users. This is the first library project in the world that has undertaken crowdsourcing on a large scale. The leader of the project Rose Holley is an advocate of using crowdsourcing to help libraries and archives expose and improve digital resources and has written articles about the Australian newspaper achievements and tips for libraries on how to crowdsource effectively.
• Awardesigns.com is a Spanish crowdsourcing platform launched in 2011: more than 2,000 designers and writers from over 15 countries (Spain and Latin America) help entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses with logo design, web design, illustration, and other types of graphic design.

• Adtriboo.com is a crowdsourcing platform that generates videos, designs, ideas and creativity. Launched in 2011, adtriboo generates fast, easy and affordable creative marketing and communication through crowdsourcing and it also offers the option to contract an individual professional as per need basis. It operates bi-lingually in English and Spanish.

B

• Bar Database is a crowdsourced effort to create the most complete list of bars all around the world. Every visitor can add his / her favorite bar and help others find a place for a great night out. Visitors can find out where their favorite drinks are available and compare prices.
• Betaville is an interactive multi-person architectural software and open source platform, which enables the public to visualise planned buildings that are to be built and collaborate or give feedback on urban planning.
• Any software project with an open Beta test.
• BlueServo is a free website which crowdsources surveillance of the Texas-Mexico border through live camera streams over the Internet. This evolved from an initiative taken by the State of Texas, which announced it would install 200 mobile cameras along the Texas-Mexico border, to enable anyone with an Internet connection to watch the border and report sightings of alleged illegal immigrants to border patrol agents.
• Britain in a Day is a Ridley Scott film, a successor project to Life in a Day and part of the BBC's Cultural Olympiad, in which people in Britain filmed themselves on 12 November 2011, and submitted video clips online for inclusion in the film.

C

• California Digital Newspaper Collection In August 2011 the California Digital Newspaper Collection implemented crowdsourced OCR text correction of its digitized historical newspapers, some published as early as 1846 (California statehood 1850). CDNC is a project of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR) at the University of California, Riverside. The CDNC is supported in part by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.
• Cerberus can be defined as an automated processing engine to translate any type of photographic satellite data into usable GIS data by harnessing the power of the crowd. In the form of an interactive computer game players get to process photographs where they have to mark interesting features like river deltas on Mars, the evolution of glaciers on Earth and so on. Cerberus as a game is equipped with an extensive learning experience in order to ready the players to do the job. Because of this Cerberus serves three important factors within the space business which are E-learning, Outreach and Crowdsourcing. Cerberus participates in the ESA Business Incubation Centre Noordwijk.
• Choosa is a place to choose designs. The procedure is simple: after register at Choosa, the companies publish their request (website, new logo design, brochures) in a brief and also the price they are willing to pay. Then the designers work and publish their proposals. Customers can monitor the work of the creative making adjustments. Finally, the client chooses the best proposal and awards the creative with the amount of money promised. The biggest difference between Choosa and other websites that provide similar services is undoubtedly the character of the community that shapes it. While in Europe and the United States crowdsourcing is already installed long ago, in Latin America was a novelty, but designers embraced it with great enthusiasm. Choosa has registered more than a thousand contests and some projects receive up to 100 designs, -reached the 100,000 designs, made by a community of over 16,000 creatives.

• Cisco Systems Inc. held an I-Prize contest in which teams using collaborative technologies created innovative business plans. The winners in 2008 was a three-person team, Anna Gossen from Munich, her husband Niels Gossen, and her brother, Sergey Bessonnitsyn, that created a business plan demonstrating how IP technology could be used to increase energy efficiency. More than 2,500 people from 104 countries entered the competition. The winning team won US$250,000.
• Citizen Archivist Dashboard is a project developed by the US National Archives and Records Administration, beginning with users transcribing 1940 Census data.
• Civil War Diaries & Letters Transcription Project: help improve access to handwritten documents held by The University of Iowa Libraries.
• Clickworker, founded in Germany in 2005 and operating in the U.S. since early 2010, is an international provider of quality-assured crowdsourcing solutions. By breaking jobs into micro-tasks, Clickworker engages its reliable, flexible and diverse workforce of Internet-savvy workers on an as-needed, scalable basis.

• CloudCrowd, originally founded in 2009, is an online work platform that breaks work into serialized project workflows, and makes individual tasks available to crowdsourced workers.
• CoContest, CoContest is the first crowdsourcing platform of interior design and architecture in the world.

• ComCrowd, founded in 2011, is business platform which simplifies IT solution sales and acquisition for companies and freelance contractors. It puts IT Products and Services on to the world stage where Buyers and Sellers can freely collaborate and identify synergy.
• Crowd4U is a project for developing an open crowdsourcing platform for academic purposes. The project started in 2010 and the first system was launched in 2011. As of December 2012, it was deployed in 14 universities in Japan. Different crowdsourcing projects, such as those for information retrieval, library problems, and help in disasters, are going on with Crowd4U.It supports a declarative programming language named CyLog for writing crowdsourcing applications.
• CrowdFlower was founded in 2007 to manage internet crowdsourcing. It is currently the largest provider of crowdsourcing solutions for enterprise with over 450 million tasks completed and 2 million contributors.
• Crowdin, Online collaborative localization tool. Offers everything a software development company or independent developer need to run successful localization campaigns for themselves and their clients.
• Crowdsourcing.org founded in 2010, the industry website, Crowdsourcing.org, is a neutral organization dedicated solely to crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. As one of the most influential and credible authorities in the crowdsourcing space, Crowdsourcing.org is recognized worldwide for its intellectual capital, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding practice expertise and unbiased thought leadership.
• Crowdsourcedratings.com founded in 2012, is a website that collects ratings of products from the entire Internet community. Anonymous, crowdsourced ratings ensure the best grassroots publicity for items. The user driven database site is 100% free to use and search, and only requires a login to add, rate, or modify items.
• Crowdspring is one of the largest marketplaces in the world for crowdsourced creative services. Launched in mid-2008, more than 100,000 designers and writers from over 200 countries work on crowdSPRING, helping entrepreneurs, startups, small businesses, big Brands and agencies with logo design, web design, illustration, other types of graphic design, industrial design and copywriting. Buyers who need a custom logo design, website design, other graphic design, industrial design or copywriting post what they need, when they need it and how much they'll pay. Once posted, creatives from around the world submit actual work. Buyers choose from among actual work (currently an average of more than 110 entries per project), not bids and proposals.
• cTuning.org, online collaborative infrastructure and repository opened in 2009 to distribute program analysis and compiler tuning among multiple users to suggest better program optimizations or hardware designs in terms of performance, size, power consumption and other characteristics using statistical analysis and machine learning. Currently undergoes major redesign.

D

• The Democratic National Committee launched FlipperTV in November 2007 and McCainpedia in May 2008 to crowdsource video gathered by Democratic trackers and research compiled by DNC staff in the hands of the public to do with as they choose — whether for a blog post, to create a YouTube video, etc.

• Dell IdeaStorm is a website launched by Dell on February 16, 2007 to allow Dell "to gauge which ideas are most important and most relevant to" the public.

• Desall.com is a crowdsourcing platform launched in 2012 that connects companies and private clients with a worldwide community of creative talents.

• DesignBay, a crowdsourcing marketplace for graphic design and creative services, launched in February 2008 and helped run a contest for global footwear company HI-TEC. HI-TEC "estimated that using DesignBay.com [and crowdsourcing] for the project saved HI-TEC up to half the costs of going down the usual design route"

• LEGO Design byME was a service connected with the construction toy Lego. Launched in 2005 under the name Lego Factory, the service allowed people to design their own Lego models using a computer program, then upload them to the Lego website, design their own box design, and order them for actual delivery. The brand also covers a small selection of products that have been designed by Lego fans, and which were available to purchase as a set.

• The search for aviator Steve Fossett, whose plane went missing in Nevada in 2007, in which up to 50,000 people examined high-resolution satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe that was made available via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The search was ultimately unsuccessful. Fosset's remains were eventually located by more traditional means. DigitalGlobe satellite imagery had previously been posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk after the disappearance of computer scientist Jim Gray at sea in January 2007, an effort that had attracted much media attention, but not provided any new clues.

• Dickens Journals online [4] is a collaborative effort to digitize and edit journals of Charles Dickens.

• Distributed Proofreaders (commonly abbreviated as DP or PGDP) is a Web-based project founded in 2000 by Charles Franks that supports the development of e-texts for Project Gutenberg by allowing many people to work together in proofreading drafts of e-texts for errors. As of October 2011, over 21,000 e-texts have been produced by DP. There are also offshoots (sister sites) such as DP-Europe and DP-Canada.
• DREAM is a Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods. The main objective is to catalyze the interaction between experiment and theory in the area of cellular network inference and quantitative model building in systems biology. The fundamental questions for DREAM are simple: How can we assess how well we are describing the networks of interacting molecules that underlie biological systems? and How can we know how well we are predicting the outcome of previously unseen experiments from our models? The answer to these questions are not so simple. Researchers have used a variety of algorithms to deduce the structure of biological networks and/or to predict the outcome of perturbations to their systems. They have also evaluated the success success of their methodologies using diverse non-standardized metrics. However what is still needed, and what DREAM aims to achieve, is a fair comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of the methods and a clear sense of the reliability of the models that researchers create.

• DIY History is a project from the University of Iowa that calls upon the public to help transcribe historical documents. It began as a project to help transcribe American Civil War diaries and grew to include every type of historical document, most notably more than 300 years of handwritten cookbooks from the Chef Louis Szathmary Culinary Collection.

• Drift bottle experiments are citizen science experiments in which a surveying organization throws into large bodies of water, bottles containing messages requesting finders of the bottles to return the messages to the organization with a statement of the time and place at which the bottles were found, allowing the organization to determine patterns of water circulation in the bodies of water.
• duolingo.com:With Duolingo you learn a language for free while helping to translate the web.

E

• EmbedPlus Pronunciation Dictionary, a web site where you can search for a word and not only get an audio of its pronunciation, but also videos submitted by real people of its use in context in real situations.

• Emporis, a provider of building data, has run the Emporis Community (a website where members can submit building information) since May 2000. Today, more than 1,000 members contribute building data throughout the world.

• The ESP Game by Luis von Ahn (later acquired by Google and renamed Google Image Labeler) started in 2003 and gets people to label images as a side-effect of playing a game. The image labels can be used to improve image search on the Web. This game led to the concept of Games with a purpose.

• EteRNA, a game in which players attempt to design RNA sequences that fold into a given configuration. The widely varied solutions from players, often non-biologists, are evaluated to improve computer models predicting RNA folding. Some designs are actually synthesized to evaluate the actual folding dynamics and directly compare with the computer models.
• Europeana 1914-1918 is a collaboration led by Europeana with support from the The Great War Archive team at the University of Oxford. A website is used by the project to encourage the public from all European Union states to contribute information about World War I, especially their family's stories and digitised photographs of their artefacts. In addition to the website, since 2011 First World War stories have been collected in person from family history roadshow events held in Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, Slovenia, Denmark, with further events planned in Cyprus, Belgium, Italy and more. The items collected by the project are released on the Internet for use under a Creative Commons licence.

• EyeWire, a game by Sebastian Seung in which players help an algorithm to segment retinal cells in 3D images of the retina. The aim is to map a mouse retina by extracting individual neurons and their connections to each other.

F

• Facebook has used crowdsourcing since 2008 to create different language versions of its site. The company claims this method offers the advantage of providing site versions that are more compatible with local cultures.

• FamilySearch Indexing is a volunteer project which aims to create searchable digital indexes for scanned images of historical documents. The documents are drawn primarily from a collection of 2.4 million microfilms made of historical documents from 110 countries and principalities. Volunteers install free software on their home computers, download images from the site, type the data they read from the image into the software, and submit their work back to the site. The data is eventually made publicly and freely available at FamilySearch.org (the world's largest nonprofit genealogical organization) for use in genealogical research. Over one billion historical records have been transcribed to date.

• Feedback Roulette is a free service for anonymous exchange of feedback about websites. There are over 4500 registered members, over 4700 websites and over 19000 reviews submitted according to the publicly available statistics. Members review each other's websites and rate received reviews to specify how useful the feedback is. Based on that the reviewer’s reputation is calculated. The system then uses the reputation to match reviewers. Feedback Roulette audience includes web masters, designers, developers, Internet business owners and entrepreneurs and anyone who is interested in gathering feedback and improving their website.

• There is an ongoing effort by United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to use crowdsourcing to collect ideas on how to best build out America's broadband infrastructure. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 calls for increased broadband deployment. The site, broadband.ideascale.com [5], allows a citizen to post an idea related to this initiative. Other visitors are invited to vote the ideas up or down. The ideas and comments have been made part of the public record.

• Foldit invites the general public to play protein folding games to discover folding strategies. Citing Foldit, MSNBC's Alan Boyle reported that "video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years," indicating that they "figure(d) out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys."

• Foxtranslate, based in San Francisco, CA, specializes in translating document by using its network of professional translators crowdsourced from over 20 different countries.

• Freelancer.com started out in Sweden in 2004 as GetAFreelancer.com, and is now owned by Sydney, Australia-based Ignition Networks. M Barrie, the CEO, claims the company is the largest outsourcing site in the world, receiving more global traffic than competitor elance. The site has 1.5 million users in 234 countries and the average job size is under $200 and it projects a US$50 million in project turnover in the next 12 months. The site takes a 10 percent cut on work allocated.

• FromThePage is free software that allows volunteers to transcribe handwritten documents online. It is used by the San Diego Natural History Museum to transcribe the Laurence M. Klauber Field Notes, by Southwestern University to transcribe the Mexican War diary of Zenas Matthews, and others. The platform integrates with the Archive.org CMS, and the transcriptions can include semantic mark-up for indexing and annotation. Users can either host the platform on their own servers by getting the source code from GitHub, or have hosting provided by the FromThePage organization.

G

• Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science project that lets members of the public classify a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The project has led to numerous scientific papers and citizen scientist-led discoveries such as Hanny's Voorwerp.

• General Electric organized a multi-million dollar challenge to find new, breakthrough ideas to create cleaner, more efficient and economically viable grid technologies, and to accelerate the adoption of smart grid technologies. The winner will be announced on Nov. 16, 2020,

• GeniusRocket is a crowdsourcing advertising agency that uses an online community of thousands of artists from around the world.
• Get a Slogan is a slogan development service based on crowdsourcing. Clients organize slogan contests and sloganeers provide slogan suggestions. Clients rate suggestions in order to get even better slogans. Crowdsourcing is used to maximize creativity.
• Get Localization, founded in 2009, is hosting several software and web-page translation crowdsourcing projects. Developers upload their content to service allowing their existing community participate to translation work.

• The Canadian gold mining group Goldcorp made 400 megabytes of geological survey data on its Red Lake, Ontario, property available to the public over the Internet. They offered a $575,000 prize to anyone who could analyze the data and suggest places where gold could be found. The company claims that the contest produced 110 targets, over 80% of which proved productive; yielding 8 million ounces of gold, worth more than $3 billion. The prize was won by a small consultancy in Perth, Western Australia, called Fractal Graphics.

• Google Image Labeler was a sort of game where users where asked to label pictures in order to improve images search results.

• Gooseberry Patch, has been using crowd-sourcing to create their community-style cookbooks since 1992. Friends, buyers, fans, sales people are all encouraged to submit a recipe. Each contributors' recipe that is selected is recognized in the book and receives a free copy.
• The Great War Archive, was a 2008 project led by the University of Oxford that asked members of the general public to digitise any artefacts they held relating to the First World War and upload them to a purpose built website. The project successfully released over 6500 items and stories online which can be freely downloaded and used for education and research. The project was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee. In 2011, the team at the University of Oxford received further funding from Europeana to run a similar crowdsourcing initiative in Germany. From 2012 Europeana extended this to become a project called Europeana 1914-1918. Europeana 1914-1918 is a collaboration led by Europeana with support from the team at the University of Oxford. There is a website where the project encourages the public from all European Union states to contribute information about World War I, especially their family's stories and digitised photographs of their artefacts.

• The Guardian's investigation into the MP Expense Scandal in the United Kingdom. The newspaper created a system to allow the public to search methodically through 700,000 expense-claim documents. Over 20,000 people participated in finding erroneous and remarkable expense claims by Members of Parliament.

H

• In 2009/10 a website was created called HaveYouGotTheNerve.Tv which was subsequently shortened to Nerve.tv. This was set up by a man called Mark Bowness who wanted to create the first crowdsourced TV production company. In order to do this, he made around 1,000 people executive producers in the company and gave them a share in the company in return for £60.00. The idea never made it off the ground. Today both websites and the company (according to Companies House) remain dormant.^{[citation needed]}

• The Vancouver Police Department has put up a website entitled Hockey Riot 2011, informing people about the VPD′s investigations into the 2011 Stanley Cup Riot. It also asks people to contribute any pictures or video that they may have taken during the riot, with the goal of identifying people who may have participated in the rioting. The site also reminds people to not use social media to take justice into their own hands, instead leaving it to the police. As of July 1, 2011, 101 arrests have been made.

• Humanoid is a startup aiming to build an aggregator of crowdsourcing marketplaces (including Amazon Mechanical Turk), adding a layer of automated workforce management on top of crowdsourced labor. Workers are asked to review each other's work, and bots assign each worker a reputation, automatically rerouting tasks by throwing in errors to test workers and otherwise computing worker fatigue.
• HuMuch uses crowdsourcing to improve price transparency. Consumers around the world share prices on good and services. Then, the prices are aggregated, normalized for foreign exchange rates, unit of measure, and taxes and presented to consumers for easy viewing comparison.

I

• IBM collected over 37,000 ideas for potential areas for innovation from brainstorming sessions with its customers, employees and their family members in 2006.
• ImageBrief is a Sydney start-up established in 2011 that aims to provide a platform for connecting commercial photographers with buyers of their images. Buyers can post a brief for an immediate image requirement and photographers submit images that are tailored to the buyer's request.

• The Infinity: The Quest for Earth project is a space MMOG that accepts contributions of concept art, 3D models, textures, sound effects, musical compositions and programming of standalone prototypes which could help development of the game. By the end of 2009 having contributions of more than 150 modeled ships, buildings and space stations, about 500 musical compositions from which 20% are considered for inclusion in the game.

• InfoArmy is a crowdsourcing platform for business data. Users research online for competitive intelligence information on public and private companies to create iPad and web reports. Current researchers come from a variety of backgrounds and from six continents.

• InnoCentive, started in 2001, crowdsources research and development for biomedical and pharmaceutical companies, among other companies in other industries. InnoCentive provides connection and relationship management services between "Seekers" and "Solvers". Seekers are the companies searching for solutions to critical challenges. Solvers are the 185,000 registered members of the InnoCentive crowd who volunteer their solutions to the Seekers. Anyone with interest and Internet access can become an InnoCentive Solver. Solvers whose solutions are selected by the Seekers are compensated for their ideas by InnoCentive, which acts as broker of the process. InnoCentive recently partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to target solutions from InnoCentive's Solver crowd for orphan diseases and other philanthropic social initiatives.

• Innovation Exchange is an open innovation vendor which emphasizes community diversity; it sources solutions to business problems from both experts and novices. Companies sponsor challenges which are responded to by individuals, people working in ad hoc teams, or by small and midsize businesses. In contrast to sites focused primarily on innovation in the physical sciences, Innovation Exchange fosters product, service, process, and business model innovation.
• Industrial Methodology for Process Verification of Research or SBV IMPROVER is a new peer review scheme for quality assurance in systems biology research. IMPROVER was created due to the increased strain of the peer review system, which is currently overwhelmed. It has been estimated from PubMed that in the last decade the growth rate of scientific publications was 5.6% per year, or equivalently, a doubling time of 13 years. This has resulted in increasing the burden on peer reviewers, which also questions whether the current peer review system can objectively assess the quality and nature of the high throughput data and the validity of the sophisticated analysis and interpretations that currently pervades systems biology publications.

• Indian rupee sign was recently developed in 2010, by using crowdsourcing to select its design through an open competition among Indian residents.

• Igotish is a crowd-sourced newspaper.

J

• Jade Magnet is Asia’s largest creative crowdsourcing platform for design solutions like logos, brochures, websites, flyers, animations with a focus on SMEs. It is a Technology platform supporting clients to extract multiple options for creative solutions before making a selection. Additionally as a value add, clients can make use of Delivery Assurance service to manage requirements
• JURATIS is a US-based legal crowdsourcing site launched in 2011 that allows users to ask and answer questions on any legal matter. The project states that it intends to become the largest legal knowledge base.
• jobmento.com is a site where jobseekers can crowdsource job search using their social networks or other people. Users can set up a bounty for finding them a job.

K

• The Katrina PeopleFinder Project used crowdsourcing to collect data for lost persons. Over 4,000 people donated their time after Hurricane Katrina. It included 90,000 entries.
• Kaggle is platform for data prediction competitions. Kaggle facilitates better predictions by providing a platform for machine learning, data prediction and bioinformatics competitions. The platform allows organizations to have their data scrutinized by the world's best statisticians.
• Khan Academy—a non-profit organization founded by educational entrepreneur Salman Khan and which has as its mission to provide a world-class education to anyone for free—is relying on volunteers to subtitle into the widely spoken languages of the world Khan Academy's substantial collection of educational videos on subjects ranging from math to art history.

L

• Lánzanos is a Spanish crowdfunding platform which allows people to find financing for their own projects
• Lawdingo brings lawyers available for immediate or scheduled legal advice consultations in one place, and lets consumers chat with lawyers online.
• LawPivot is a startup that allows publicly or confidentially asking legal questions to expert attorneys. Users can post questions on the site, and lawyers message them back with advice.
• LawnMowingOnline is a unique service in that instead of the traditional approach of using skilled laborers to mow lawns they offer the jobs to a large group of local individuals through an open call. This has allowed them to regularly mow lawns with just a day's notice over 1,000 miles away and have given almost 300 people (as of April 2011) the opportunity to earn semi-regular income while providing services much cheaper than a traditional lawn care service.
• L-Crowd is a project started in 2012 by universities and libraries in Japan to take the crowdsourcing approach to library problems. As of December 2012, people from 14 universities participate in performing microtasks for cleaning the bibliograhic data of National Diet Library.
• LetterRep.com is an crowdsourced letter writing service with writers from around the world. Site operation involves customers submitting requests for letters to be written; the requests are broadcast via email to the site's 3500+ writers worldwide. Writers compose letters in response to requests and post them back to the site which notifies requesters via email as new letters are posted. Requesters review the submitted letters and choose the one(s) that best suit their needs and situation.
• In 2010 the Library of Congress received, as a donation, the Liljenquist family's collection of photographs of the American Civil War. With most of the people and photographers unidentified, the Library posted the images on Flickr and sought the public's help in providing information: "Please let us know if you recognize a face from your family, a regiment, or a photographer’s painted studio backdrop!"
• Life in a Day is Kevin Macdonald's 95-minute documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips (4500 hours) submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day. Yumi Goto of TIME LightBox remarked that "the most striking aspect of this documentary is that it’s the first crowdsourced, user-generated content to hit the big screen."
• lingoking is a German telephone interpreting service, which uses crowdsourcing to distribute interpreting assignments to interpreters all over the world.
• Liza Alert is Russia based crowdsourcing project for finding missing children. LizaAlert, the hub of the network that consists of 1,300 members, now provides information on recent cases of missing kids that need to be searched for immediately. The core of the network consists of its 50-70 most active members who are involved in search activities on a weekly basis.
• L'Oreal used viewer-created advertising messages of Current TV to pool new and fresh advertising ideas.
• Lucky Rentals turned over its marketing to 100 complete strangers for 100 days using Fiverr.com which is a hugely popular online market where sellers offer services for $5.
• Local By Us is crowd-sourced local news, events, opinions and classifieds for anywhere that can be found on a google map.

M

• Metadata Games is a free and Open Source crowdsourcing game project, using a collection of online casual games to help digital archivists organize visual libraries. In the Metadata Games, players tag photos, helping to increase the usefulness of the image library. The developers are currently working on games for tagging audio and video/moving image collections.
• Metropolitalia is a gaming platform developed at the University of Munich built to collect linguistic data on the divergence of Italien vernaculars and dialects.
• Microtask is a company that has developed a software platform for global distribution of short-duration tasks to online workers. The system supports automated quality assurance and provides service-level agreements for task quality and turnaround times.
• Mob4Hire is the world's largest mobile testing and market research community. They currently list over 1,100 developers in 86 countries and more than 45,000 testers on 350 carriers in 150 countries. The company recently won a Meffy award from the Mobile Entertainment Forum for 'Most Innovative Business Model'.
• Mindpixel was an online artificial intelligence project to build a knowledgebase of true/false statements, and ran from 2000 to 2005.
• Mi Frase de Negocios is a crowdsourcing project that attempts to gather the business phrases most relevant to each person, and contribute this wisdom in a free to consult website. Anybody can collaborate with phrases they have heard (or authored) and can also review the phrases that everybody has contributed to the project.

N

• Netflix Prize, was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm that predicts user ratings for films, based on previous ratings. The competition was held by Netflix, an online DVD-rental service, and was completed in September 2009. The grand prize of $1,000,000 was reserved for the entry which best shows Netflix's own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10%. Netflix provided a training data set of over 100 million ratings that more than 480,000 users gave to nearly 18,000 movies, which is one of the largest real real-life data sets available for research. The related forum maintained by Netflix has seen lively discussions and contributed a lot to the success of this competition. A very relevant fact to the power of crowdsourcing is that among the top teams are not only academic researchers, but laymen with no prior exposure to collaborative filtering (virtually learning the problem space from scratch).

• Navfree, the first free GPS navigation app on the iPhone. App was launched by UK startup Navmii in Sept 2010. The app has over 10 million users as at Sept 2012 and uses map data from the OpenStreetMap project. In addition the app allows users to feedback any errors in the map, thereby crowd-sourcing map corrections and improving navigation for all users. Navfree is available on iOS and Android and is live in over 30 countries.

O

See also: open innovation

• Old Weather is a web-based effort to transcribe weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes and will be of use to Historians in tracking past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.

• The Open Source Science Project, founded in 2008, is a web-based social business that maintains a research microfinance platform through which undergraduate students may propose research-based approaches to solving the world's most pressing problems; and receive funding (in the form of microinvestments) from the broader online community. In addition, The OSSP seeks to develop an openly-accessible research-based scientific curriculum that will greatly increase global access to cutting edge research information at no cost. It is wholly dedicated to rendering transparent the 'black-box' of scientific research by affording all individuals - irrespective of geographic, cultural, socio-economic, academic, or personal background; the opportunity to participate directly in the scientific research process.

• The Open Dinosaur Project is a community research project to aggregate published measurements of ornithischian dinosaur limb bones for many different taxa in order to study the multiple evolutionary transitions from bipedality to quadrupedality in this group of dinosaurs. The Open Dinosaur Project was founded to involve scientists and the public alike in developing a comprehensive database of dinosaur limb bone measurements, to investigate questions of dinosaur function and evolution. The measurements gathered by the community participants will be analyzed by the project leaders and results will be published in an open access peer-reviewed scientific journal. All contributors will be listed as co-authors on the eventual publication.

• OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the world, which has over 100,000 signed up contributors in mid-2009. Creation and maintenance of geospatial data is a labor intensive task which is expensive using traditional approaches, and crowdsourcing is also being used by commercial companies in this area including Google and TomTom.

• Orcagame is a serious Casual Game to let citizen scientists help researchers in bioacoustics teach machine learning systems how to recognize Orca (Killer Whale) vocalizations. It is a simple matching game in which people can listen to and see the spectrogram for an unknown clip of sound, and are asked to pick which of a list of sounds it is most similar to. It uses sounds from The Orchive, a repository of over 20,000 hours of Orca vocalizations, which contains data from Orcalab, a land-based orca research facility off the coast of British Columbia, Canada.

• Oxfam Novib (Netherlands) mid-2008 launched a crowdsourcing initiative named Doeners.net, meant for people to support the organization's campaigning activities.

P

• Path launched a project to crowdsource translations for its mobile platform in April 2012.

• Prova (Swedish for "to try") launched December, 2008 as a crowdsource marketplace that connects businesses with professional ad designers to create print designs, audio ads, video content, and digital designs. Ad designers from all over the world compete for ad creation projects listed on the site.

• Patexia is a multidisciplinary social network where researchers participate in intellectual property contests (for example, prior art search) submitted by businesses, allowing them to solve real industry problems while earning money, building their reputation and developing industry connections.

• There is currently an effort to use crowdsourcing to purchase the Pabst Brewing Company. Users pledge money toward the $300 million purchase price and, if the project is successful, receive part ownership of the company and free beer proportional to their donation amount.

• Pepsi launched a marketing campaign in early 2007 which allowed consumers to design the look of a Pepsi can. The winners would receive a $10,000 prize, and their artwork would be featured on 500 million Pepsi cans around the United States.

• The Phylo video game invites players to give in to their addictive gaming impulses while contributing to the greater good by trying to decode the code for genetic diseases.

• It's More Fun In the Philippines (Twitter hashtag: #ItsMoreFunInThePhilippines) is an international tourism campaign from the Republic of the Philippines that utilizes crowdsourcing to create digital content, specifically images, following a designated design style particularly the syntax and the official font which is Harabara Bold.

• PublicStuff is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software company that lets citizens submit requests, upload photos, comment, follow requests made by others and receive status updates regarding their service request. The platform also provides two way communication between the public and managing agencies.

Q

• QuieroHacerlo! it's a crowdsourcing based online platform that actually makes voice to text transcriptions in Spanish language. Humans transcribe little fragments of voice records and get paid for it.

R

• reCAPTCHA uses CAPTCHA to help digitize the text of books while protecting websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas. Humans are presented images of the book, and asked to provide the corresponding text. Twenty years of The New York Times have already been digitized.
• [Rideshare 2.0] is crowdsourcing mass transit by empowering every driver to offer the open seat(s) in their vehicle so we can create a social transportation network.
• Rentpricemap is an upcoming crowdsourcing based platform which aims to provide insightful information on real estate rent and price values.
• RootMetrics (a.k.a. Root Wireless) uses a mobile client application on various kinds of smartphones to collect data about carrier signal quality and data speeds, then transmits that data to its servers. Consumers can view the crowdsourced data online in the form of color-coded maps that aid purchasing decisions by showing unbiased data from different carriers side-by-side.

S

• Scoutti is a social online platform and mobile application allowing simple crowdsourcing of news photos for media uses.
• Secret London is composed mostly of Londoners who use the site to share suggestions and photos of London. Originally started as a Facebook Group in 2010 in response to a competition to win an internship at Saatchi & Saatchi, Secret London gained 150,000 members within 2 weeks. This early popularity prompted its founder, Tiffany Philippou to appeal to the community to help build the group a website, which was launched 10 days later.

• SeeClickFix is a web tool that allows citizens to report non-emergency neighborhood issues, which are communicated to local government, as a form of community activism. It has an associated free mobile phone application. Similar to FixMyStreet.

• setiQuest is a citizen science project that allows people with any level of science background to look for signs of technologically advanced civilizations in data collected from space. The goal is to answer the question - "Are we alone?"

• Show us a better way is a British crowdsourcing initiative that ask people a way to improve the communication of public data. The winning idea has been awarded with a £20'000 fund prize.

• Smartling is an enterprise translation management platform that can be used to crowdsource translations for digital content. IMVU, Cloudflare, and Path used the platform to crowdsource website translations.

• Smartsheet is an online software service and consultancy that enables businesses to track and manage work through online sharing and crowdsourcing methods. The company's Smartsourcing service enables people to anonymously submit and manage all phases of crowdsourced work processing. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is one of the work exchange platforms with which Smartsheet is integrated.
• SocialAttire is an online platform that allows fashion professionals, design students, and anyone else with an idea to freely upload sketches and sample dresses they've designed. The community votes on their favorite styles, and every two weeks, the most popular dress is produced and sold on the website.
• Squadhelp is a crowdsourcing platform that helps entrepreneurs and small business owners outsource their branding, marketing and web design tasks to hundreds of freelancers. The projects run in the form of contests and the best submission wins the award (which is prepaid by the contest holder).
• Starbytes is the crowdsourcing site for ICT professionals, programmers, web designers and graphic artists powered by Reply S.p.A.

• My Starbucks Idea is a community website realized by Starbucks. It is designed to collect suggestions and feedback from customers. The website is powered by the Salesforce software.

• Stardust@Home is an ongoing citizen science project, begun in 2006, utilizing internet volunteer "clickworkers" to find interstellar dust samples by inspecting 3D images from the Stardust spacecraft.
• Studentbasecamp which is a free online service that allowed students located student discounts online outsourced its marketing camping to 150 freelancer for 75 days using FiversWorld.com which is a hugely popular online marketplace where sellers offer services for $5–$25.

• Student of Fortune is an online service that allows students to submit homework problems for tutors to answer through a tutorial service for a fee. Started by a high school dropout.

T

• TeamSurv is aproject for crowd sourcing position and depth data from boats, to improve the accuracy and coverage of bathymetric data for nautical charts and scientific/ecological applications.
• Testbirds is a provider of crowdsourced software testing based in Munich, Germany. Testbirds uses the power of the crowd in oder to test software on a variety of devices with specific focus groups, for example to gather feedback regarding user acceptance and functionality of the software.
• TobaccoFree is a project to collect information about smoking in private vehicles, started by the University of Otago in October 2011 and launched in January 2012.
• Tomnod crowdsources the identification of objects and places in satellite images using online map interfaces that engage many people to each view and tag a small section of a large area on the planet. Projects include searching for the tomb of Genghis Khan, mapping earthquake damage after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and counting refugee camps in Somalia.
• Torneo de Ideas is the first Mexican crowdsourcing platform, it is a community whose main objective is to provide creative solutions to the needs of small and middle Hispanic corporations. They currently provide solutions mainly on graphic design and each project or "tournament" receive an average of 150 designs. Torneo de Ideas was winner of the startup contest Wayra Mexico 2012 and has been mentioned in several entrepreneur publications such as Entrepreneur.
• Transcribe Bentham is an award-winning crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, run by University College London's Bentham Project, in partnership with UCL's Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Library Services, UCL Learning and Media Services, the University of London Computer Centre, and the online community. The project was launched in September 2010 and is making freely-available, via a specially-designed transcription interface, digital images of UCL's vast Bentham Papers collection — the unpublished writings of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, which run to some 60,000 manuscript folios — in order to engage the public and recruit volunteers to assist in transcribing the material. Volunteer-produced transcripts will contribute to the Bentham Project's production of the new edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, and will be uploaded to UCL's digital Bentham Papers repository, widening access to the collection for all and ensuring its long-term preservation. Manuscripts can be viewed and transcribed by signing-up for a transcriber account at the Transcription Desk, via the Transcribe Bentham website.

Transcribe Bentham has garnered international attention, including a feature article in The New York Times, and a radio broadcast on Deutsche Welle World radio. The project was shortlisted for the 2011 Digital Heritage Award, and received an Award of Distinction in the Digital Communities category of the 2011 Prix Ars Electronica. The open-source code for the Transcribe Bentham transcription tool is available for reuse and customisation.

• Tribevine is a project that collects sports and outdoor gear information into a user edited semi structured product information database.
• TunedIT is an online laboratory for data scientists, with Challenges platform that hosts programming competitions in data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence, for crowdsourcing of intelligent algorithms.

U

• Unilever has recently decided to drop its ad agency of 16 years, Lowe, and has turned to the crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty to find creative ideas for its next TV campaign. Unilever has worked with Lowe on the snack food brand Peperami since 1993, but has decided to submit their brief out to the public, rather than a small team of creatives.

• Ushahidi (Swahili for "testimony" or "witness") is a website created in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election (see 2007–2008 Kenyan crisis) that collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a Google map. It is also the name of the open source software developed for that site, which has since been improved, released freely, and used for a number of similar projects.

• uTest's business model is based on the idea that crowdsourcing is better suited to web and mobile app testing than other outsourcing models.

• Userfarm Userfarm is the first international platform of video crowdsourcing, the easiest choice to make video content. Brands, Agencies, Publishers and Broadcasters can access on UserFarm a network of more than 20.000 videomakers able to create a full range of different forms of video content:

1. real life: video diaries, documentaries, stories of journeys in videos made by the video makers of UserFarm
2. journalism: local news, sport events, event coverage and interviews done by mobile journalists
3. advertising: TV spots, viral videos, tutorials for any product or service
4. how to: video advice for a wide range of topics, from bricolage to looking after home pets
5. fiction: shorts, parodies, comedy sketches, mash ups
6. other: videoart, cartoons, music videos and talent scouting

V

• VenCorps, founded in 2008, is a venture capital fund which invests based upon crowd-sourced decisions.

W

• Waisda is an video labeling game created by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The institute uses Waisda? to crowdsource annotation of its archival video collection. The platform is available as open source software.
• Waze is a free turn-by-turn GPS application for mobile phones that uses crowdsourcing to provide routing and real-time traffic updates.

• We Are The World 25 for Haiti (YouTube Edition) is a massively collaborative charity song and music video produced by Canadian singer-songwriter Lisa Lavie and posted to the YouTube video sharing website to raise money for victims of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake. The video was the creation of a collaboration of 57 unsigned or independent YouTube musicians geographically distributed around the world. The Tokyo Times referred to J Rice's subsequently produced "We Pray for You" video, involving largely the same participants as were in Lavie's video, as an example of a trend to use crowdsourcing for charitable purposes.

• Whale.fm (or The Whale Song Project) is a project begun in 2011 as a collaboration between the Citizen Science Alliance and Scientific American magazine. Its purpose is to use crowdsourcing to analyze large numbers of clips and spectrograms of whale sounds to help decipher them. The project aims to estimate the size of the whales' call repertoire, find out if different whale subspecies have different "languages", and eventually find out what the meaning and purpose of the calls is. Whale.fm

• Wikipedia is often cited as a successful example of crowdsourcing, despite objections by co-founder Jimmy Wales to the term.

• Wimax Monitoring is a free web site available for the users of the Italian Wireless 4G ISP Linkem which displays with its map the feedbacks sent to it by the users related to the status and quality (connection speed) of their connection.

• Witology is a Russian company providing crowdsourcing solutions for business. The key clients are: Sberbank, Rosatom, Life, Agency of strategic initiatives and many others.

• Wishabi, a Canadian online shopping platform, recruits a community of deal hunters to crowdsource product offers available to Canadians. Participants are rewarded with monetary incentive proportional to their individual contribution divided by the total contribution of the community. Top participants upload about 1000 offers a month averaging a 80-90% accuracy rate.

• Worth1000 is a community focused on creative contests, occasionally with financial incentives. Original contests invited members to submit manipulated images (typically using Photoshop) for specific themes, often of a comic nature. Now they have new contests regularly for photo effects (aka manipulated images), photography without effects, illustrations, writing and multimedia. While most contests are run by the website, anyone can apply to post a contest, and people seeking professional creative work like logo design are encouraged to add financial incentives to their requests for less playful creativity.

X

• X-Prize is an innovation incentive prize using crowdsourcing mechanisms in order to tackle grand challenges that are considered failing as free markets. These represent pressing needs the humanity seeks solutions for, that previously have not been served by real entrepreneurial action.
• xTune is an enterprise social software that uses crowdsourcing to distribute work inside organizations.

Z

• Zooppa is a global social network for creative talent that crowdsources advertising. Founded in 2007, Zooppa partners with companies to launch brand sponsored advertising contests. In competition for cash prizes, members submit their original ads in response to a company's creative brief. Grand prize winners are selected by the brands, and additional awards are given to creators as determined by vote of the Zooppa community and selection by the Zooppa staff. As of May 2010, more than 70 brands have launched crowdsourced advertising campaigns on Zooppa's platform including Google, Nike, Hershey's, General Mills, Microsoft, NBC Universal, and Mini Cooper.