Summary: This week on the Everyone Funding Startups podcast we spoke to Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower, the leading microtask crowdsourcing platform and also the company behind the CrowdConf crowdsourcing industry events. CrowdFlower solves problems ranging from product categorization to business lead verification to content creation. With its crowd of millions of contributors CrowdFlower claims to make up the world’s largest workforce. We asked Lukas how he’s perceived the growth in the crowdsourcing industry since the term was first coined by Jeff Howe in 2006. You can listen to the podcast by clicking here or by subscribing to the Everyone Funding Startups iTunes channel. 00:45 How did you get started with CrowdFlower? 02:55 What is a typical case at the moment for using crowdsourcing? 04:55 Who makes up your crowd of contributors? 05:50 What made you want to get involved in running events and conferences for the crowdsourcing industry? 09:10 What are your expectations for your CrowdConf 2012 event in San Francisco on October 23rd? 09:55 To what extent are companies using crowdsourcing for innovation rather than just processing high volumes of microtasks? 11:03 How do your clients look at building crowdsourcing competency as an area of in-house expertise? 12:20 How has the crowdsourcing sector in general grown over the last few years? 14:30 What do you think will be the longer-term consequences of crowdsourcing for employers? 15:50 What is the implication for employees? 18:00 How Skout (backed by Andreessen Horowitz) started out using crowdsourcing 20:15 Will any industry remain unaffected by crowdsourcing? 22:20 How should people get in touch with you and how can they attend the CrowdConf 2012 event? 23:31 End For full details about CrowdConf 2012 in San Francisco on October 23rd 2012 and for information on how to attend please visit www.crowdconf.com. The conference is primarily for company innovators and decision makers, Enterprise Data Managers, Marketing Directors, Entrepreneurs, Investors and VCs, and will cover topics such as: How to take a business idea from launch to profit with the power of the crowd Microtasking solutions to moderate content, optimize search results, measure social media sentiment, and handle big data Self-service crowdsourcing solutions you can start using today For more information about CrowdFlower you can get in touch with Lukas Biewald at lukas@crowdflower.com or by going straight to their website, www.crowdflower.com. Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of Everyone Funding Startups. Check out our new podcast page at EveryoneFundingStartups.com. And you can now interact with the show on twitter @growVCpodcast. Let us know what you want to hear…we’re listening.
