SAN FRANCISCO (Commodity Online): The industrial revolution and assembly line revolutionised the way products were manufactured in large scale as compared to small scale or cottage industries in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In the 20th century, the advent of 'outsourcing' business model changed the way businesses looked at manufacturing and services activities. The realisation came that large companies could sublet a part of their functions to other companies around the globe to save on labour costs and time. Ofcourse, this led to creation of more jobs and wealth in developing nations while workers in developed countries who lost their jobs as a result cried foul.

Now, project management has entered ver 3 perhaps advancing upon the 'outsourcing'concept a little further and working across boundaries-- the new concpet is 'crowd sourcing'. It may even emerge as a threat to 'outsourcing industry'. In crowd sourcing specialists companies help other companies to manage their critical tasks using the internet to tap into vast pools of talent and creativity.

Crowdsourcing, the process of using a distributed, unrelated group of workers to carry out tasks over the Internet, has long been associated with speed and low cost. The new generation of crowdsourcing addresses one of the biggest previous limitations of this approach: the difficulty of linking simple online tasks into sophisticated workflows.

One such US company called CloudCrowd is using 'Labor-as-a-service' platform in helping companies reduce overhead, increase efficiency, and lower costs by breaking large projects into smaller tasks, and distributing them to its virtual workforce. It has already won a few awards for innovation in business.

According to CloudCrowd's CEO, Alex Edelstein, "First generation crowdsourcing solutions only offered a limited range of feasible tasks, and they required too much management and delivered poor work quality. CloudCrowd is the next generation of crowdsourcing because it can handle much more complex tasks. Plus it's fast, accurate, and very reliable."

Working closely with their clients, CloudCrowd's team of project managers and developers manage every step, from creating the most efficient way to get tasks done to delivering the finished work. The company distributes tasks to its online registered workers at CloudCrowd Workspace. Each does a portion of a client's project, allowing tasks to be completed much more quickly than they would be done in-house, or even with traditional outsourcing.

CloudCrowd's sophisticated credibility framework runs the task results through a proprietary reputation management process to ensure the accuracy of the finished work. CloudCrowd currently has more than 18,000 workers. Each earns their own Credibility Rating which determines the types of tasks they are offered. Workers are able to see how much each separate task pays, and earnings are distributed through PayPal. CloudCrowd has already posted more than 60,000 individual tasks in a single day.

"When crowdsourcing first emerged a few years ago, its range of services and accuracy was very limited," said CloudCrowd's CEO Alex Edelstein. "Now, similar to the way Henry Ford's early assembly lines created a new, more efficient way to complete work, we've designed an online process that delivers accurate finished work for even complex projects at a significant savings."

Today's crowdsourcing workers don't resemble workers of the industrial revolution. Working from home or from the neighborhood coffee shop, while the baby is sleeping, or late at night, they can move easily from one task to the next, participating in a variety of different work. The tasks, which range from quick, one penny jobs to comprehensive ten dollar projects, challenge workers and give them an opportunity to make real money.

Fortune 500 companies, small businesses and organizations from a wide array of industries are all benefitting from CloudCrowd's innovative "virtual factory" model. Its team of project managers and developers begin by designing customized workflows and breaking client's large projects into thousands of granular tasks. These individual tasks are then distributed online to more than 18,000 registered workers at CloudCrowd Workspace. Once complete, each task is checked and verified through a series of escalating peer reviews that ensures its accuracy. Each worker earns an individual Credibility Rating that determines the level of tasks they are offered, and their rating improves with each task that they complete correctly. CloudCrowd's proprietary system allows thousands of tasks to be done in parallel, completed and delivered much more quickly than they could be done in-house or with traditional outsourcing.

Many types of complex tasks are possible, including content creation, content moderation, internet research, audio and video transcription, foreign language translations, image categorization, data entry, and data processing. Dozens of industries will benefit from CloudCrowd's reliable time and money-saving solutions, including Retailing, Wholesaling, Distribution, Publishing, Technology, Advertising, Market/Consumer Research, Social Media, Education, and many others.

"CloudCrowd is Crowdsourcing 2.0," added Edelstein, "For the first time, companies can effectively leverage this talented workforce to accomplish large, complex projects for a fraction of the cost and time."

CloudCrowd was recently honored by StartupBusiness.com on their "Hot Startup" list. More than 300 companies applied but only 35 were selected for the honor. (Courtesy: PRNewswire)

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