DEV Community: Taufik R

8 Best Crowdsourcing Websites for Apps & Games

Taufik R — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 16:01:46 +0000

Even though crowdsourcing is a centuries-old concept, it is only recently that it has become accessible to smaller, younger innovators. How can this concept of complete strangers testing your application help you?

Crowdsourcing in IT has multiple uses. Collecting mass data, usability testing and research are just a few of those examples.

Conventionally these tasks were done by hiring a large improvised workforce which used to be expensive, time-consuming and very difficult to scale. Crowdsourcing helps tackle all these issues and provides benefits like optimized efficiency, increased flexibility, and reduced cost.

Here, I have listed the top 7 crowdsourcing websites that you can use to perfect your system.

uTest

Usability testing has indeed become one of the most important key steps in the Software Testing procedure. It helps to determine the extent to which your software product is easy to use, learn and understand.

However, bad news for all the UI/UX experts, usability testing is not an easy job to perform. This is where uTest comes to your assistance. One of the most important key features of uTest is that allows you to perform usability testing online.

uTest has “18,000 QA professionals from 150 countries”, making it one of the best platforms to test your software.

The testing is carried out by well-experienced developers who not only perform usability testing on your software products but also give you detailed usability feedback and perform research for you if required.

In 2015, with an increasing number of testers around 400,000, uTest rebranded as “Applause App. Quality, Inc.” with an updated crowdsourcing site connecting the software testers all over the world. Facebook, Google, Fox Broadcasting, eBay, Concur and Runkeeper are some of the many influential customers of uTest.

Hence, if you are looking for a platform to get your mobile application or game product tested, uTest is the ideal place to look for help!

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that outsources certain processes and jobs to a widespread workforce, for both individuals and businesses.

With 500,000+ users, MTurk is perhaps the most famous, most diverse and most trusted tool in the realm of crowdsourcing.

This site allows new startups or businesses to acquire insight and skills from a workforce that is global. It allows them to augment data collection and streamline business activities. Moreover, MTurk also aids to speed up machine learning development.

MTurk is very famous in the field of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) because of its global nature. From gaming to UI testing, this website offers every sort of service that you can possibly think of.

MTurk should be your go-to crowdsourcing website if you want to conduct accessibility testing of your application, or if you want to find the effectiveness of your e-learning games.

MicroWorkers

Now a well-established name in crowdsourcing, with 1+ million users, MicroWorkers is a direct competitor of MTurk. Predominantly US and UK-based, Microworks provide versatile services to its users, from Data Mining to surveys, this website has it all.

Even though the interface is not the best looking, this is probably the quickest and easiest website to get started on. Within 48 hours of making an account and paying for a task, your request goes live.

Posting a project or “campaign” on Microworkers is similar to posting a gig on Fiverr. You put a title, instructions, and the number of minutes that your workers need to spend on your campaign, and you are good to go. Do note that all campaigns are submitted for a review before becoming live.
Not everything is gold here though. Unlike MTurk and other top crowdsourcing websites, Microworkers lacks strong customer support. If you have an issue, finding help is next to impossible.

With easy access, comes unreliable users. The jobs on Microworkers are not that well paid, so finding good people to work on your project becomes a hassle.

Crowdsourcer.io

Relatively new in the market, the Crowdsourcer.io is such a platform that is equally beneficial for the employers and freelancers alike.

It works on the principle of profit-sharing. Let’s make you understand with a simple example.

Suppose you are a team-lead whose job is to develop an application or a game. Before getting down to business, your job is to develop your own team, assign milestones to every developer and then get started.

Remember, you are in need of top-talent and you have access to several online platforms where you can simply post a job. Within a matter of a few seconds, your email will be flooded with dozens of resumes and from here, a tiring process of hiring the best coder starts.

The CrowdSourcer.io works smartly. It allows a team-lead to create a project and upload all the necessary files related to that project on the platform. Once it’s done, the team-lead is asked to specify the number of contributors that are needed on board. The freelancer out there who are searching for a project to work on will simply check out the attached files and once he is absolutely sure that his contribution will be worthwhile, will simply contact the team-lead and will become a part of the team.

Crowdsourcer.io has bridged the gap between the talent and the opportunities and is proving to be a great crowdsourcing tool across the globe.

Figure Eight

With more than 10 billion judgments and long-term experience, Figure Eight aims to integrate the human and machine insight to produce quality rated training data that generates the world’s most innovative machine learning (ML) and business solutions.

Moreover, it should be noted that Figure Eight’s enterprise-ready data annotation platform allows ML and data-driven business solutions to combine and scale across numerous different industries. These industries may include retail, automotive, finance, manufacturing, agriculture, life sciences, robotics, and the list goes on.

Some of the many tasks performed by this crowdsourcing platform include text and natural language processing (NLP), Audio and Speech Recognition, ML Assisted Data Labelling, ML Assisted Text Annotation, ML Assisted Video Object Tracking, Search Relevance, and so much more.

Figure Eight currently partners with some of the top technology companies and BPOs including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Watson, and Amazon Web Services. If you are looking for a crowdsourcing platform to transform your text, audio, images, and video into high-quality annotated data then Figure Eight is the best possible option for you.

Clickworker

With 700,000 users, if you are an already established, this option can help you get better. Not for new innovators and startups, Clickworkers charges $400 just as a setup fee unlike most of its competitors who let you set up without any fee.

To some developers, this hefty fee would seem reasonable considering the top-notch customer support that Clickworkers provide.

Interesting fact for you, Clickworker aims to provide both the services to its valued customers: Self Services and Managed Services.
Some of the many Self Services offered by Clickworker include text, translation, survey and sentiment analysis. They offer Managed Services in case the Self Services is not the solution that you are looking for.

Services such as text, research, categorization and tagging, product data management, surveys, AI-training data, and mobile crowdsourcing are different services offered under Clickworker’s Managed Services department. You can tell them about your project and their project management team will set-up and run the project for you.

With a new mobile app in the market, Clickworker has become more easily accessible.

Innocentive

Having clients such as Ford under its belt and with 300,000+ users, Innocentive is quickly becoming an efficient and effective platform for crowdsourcing.

Do not get overwhelmed by terms such as “Seekers” or “Pavilion” used on this site. Once you understand their meanings, it becomes a relatively easy platform to set up.

Here is how Innocentive works:

They typically begin with their Challenge Driven InnovationTM (CDI) training workshop which will help you to identify and illustrate your problems and needs.

In the next step, their seasoned Challenge Experts will work with you to decompose and formulate the problems or needs as ‘Challenges’. These challenges are then posted anonymously & then comes the job of Innocentive’s Solvers.

The job of the Solvers is to come up with a feasible solution. In the final step, you get to evaluate the solutions proposed by the Solvers and select those to award. You only need to award those solutions that fully meet your requirements.

The only major problem that its users have pointed out is that there is no proper screening of people working on your posted project. Other than that, with amazing customer service, this is a tool perfectly suited for people who are interested in the fields of CS, advanced medicine and business management.

Oclavi

Oclavi is an annotation platform that focuses on providing annotation tools to facilitate models to learn effectively and work efficiently in the real world.

One of Oclavis’s major goals is to make Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning easy for the developers by providing API ready classified data. High-quality labeling output, AI and Deep learning with API ready, and classifying objects for Machine Learning are some of the major tasks you can trust this crowdsourcing website with.

Oclavi is known for providing its customers with some of the fastest, collaborative and accurate ways of annotating images, videos, and 3d data sensors. Oclavi is mostly known for its image annotation solution which will allow you to annotate Bounding Box, Polygon, Circle, Point and Cuboidal annotations with the highest possible quality. Some of Oclavis’s main features are Image annotation, Video annotation, and Medical annotation.

For predictive and imperative annotations for your AI and Deep Learning models, Oclavi is the best crowdsourcing website option you have.

Final words:
Crowdsourcing is a perfect way to know how your application or a game would perform in the market before it's even launched. With the market becoming saturated options, selecting the perfect fit for your application/game can become an overwhelming task. Since you want the best services for your buck, and a perfect system by the end of it, crowdsourcing is one step that you cannot afford to compromise on.

Before committing to one tool, I suggest that you do thorough research. Be confident of what your project requires and what is being offered by the website/tool. Once you have jotted down the requirements, you are ready to embark on the crowdsourcing journey.

Evolving Ecosystem of Collaboration Platforms

Taufik R — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 09:17:24 +0000

Turning an idea into a fully-functional software or an application is the biggest dream for a technopreneur. Thanks to the wonders of technology which made it quite easier for us to pursue our ideas without much hustle.

Lately, there's been a lot of buzz about the utilities being offered by the developer platforms. Now, what do these platforms actually do? The developer platforms have made the overall software development process easier, collaborative and standardized. For instance, you have a great idea for a gaming application in your mind. After exhaustive brainstorming, your team comes up with a strategy to work on this project. The question arises, how exactly have you determined the "right approach"? Traditionally, no other game developer is going to come to your aid since everyone out there is your rival. Here's when open source developer platforms kick in.

These platforms have made the software developers realize that the information they have, is meant for sharing. By collaborating with each other, people will get to know things and will strive to beat each other by writing quality code which is free from functional errors. The developer platforms that I'm talking about are equipped with advanced development tools and frameworks which foster a potentially productive working environment.

How Does a Developer Platform Work?

The main idea of a developer platform is, it acts as a huge repository for all project files. It also saves several versions of the codes which a fellow team member submits. The development teams either working on-site or remotely, can track the changes and the team leads can easily measure the progress of a contributing team member.

Developer Platforms Help Maintaining Developers' Productivity:
While working on a developer platform, you can manage a whole project remotely. You can assign different roles to different people based on their expertise and can track changes as well. Collaborative platforms are also being used by a huge number of Fortune-500 companies because these platforms are ensuring compliance with the quality standards which many programmers tend to ignore.

It doesn't stop here!

The collaboration platforms of today have evolved to a whole new level. Platforms like the Crowdsourcer.io, is setting new benchmarks for the already-present developer platforms. Developers these days can search any project well-suited to their level of expertise and skill-set, apply to become contributors in that project, get interviewed and accepted.

After acceptance, they pick modules of their own choosing and get started on working on their part of the system. The moment their tasks are completed, they commit the code on any of these version control developer platforms and get paid their fair share of the amount.

Enhanced Code Quality:
Different programmers have different coding habits. Some of them are in habit of writing small bits of code and make it go live while others submit completed files of the code.

The developer platforms ensure that a developer should follow a certain set of rules and regulations. Initially, the developer with a higher number of commits was considered as highly productive. Nowadays, it's not so. Productivity trackers in the developer platforms have ensured a thorough and logical determination of productive contributors.

The rest of the factors which play a vital role in determining and measuring the productivity of a developer are:

Code language.
Code quality.
Compliance with OOP fundamentals.
Code functionality.

That's the actual beauty of collaborative development!

Constituents of a Developer Platform:

There can be many fundamentals of a developer platform but generally, there are three.

1. The Source Code:
The core idea behind introducing the developer platforms was to maintain the sanctity of the source code which is a suite of well-planned instructions which forms the basis of any software project. Throughout the entire project, every contributor tries his level best to keep his/her code distinguished from the rest of the contributors.

2. Repository:
At this level, who don't know what does this word represent? Of course, it's central storage where the entire code and related files are placed which are related to a certain project. Except, in developer platforms, this central storage is cloud-based and the only thing which a contributor has to worry about, is the deadline.

3. Version Control:
The best thing about the version control feature is, it keeps a record of all the previous versions of a code related to a project in a tree-like structure. You start either from the roots and keep on building up till the parent node comes, or you start right from a sub-root and start developing your way down. At every level, the activities that you do are tracked and are totally visible to the team lead.

In order to stay updated about the changes and to track the work logs of every contributor in the team, there is a strong need to leverage the potential of developer platforms.

Be it the Github.com or Gitlab or even the Crowdsourcer.io, the main idea behind these platforms is to increase productivity and promote an environment of contribution and take it to the next level.

The contributor platforms have changed the way people used to plan, code, save and update their tasks. These platforms have also ensured strict standards of professionalism which the developer's community always lacks. Software projects are being developed at a lower cost and within timing constraints. This is the age of developer platforms and how far it'll go, only time will tell!

CrowdSourcer.io - The Contributor Platform of 2019

Taufik R — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 16:05:41 +0000

Not more than a decade ago, a collaboration platform was only considered to be a tool that fosters effective communication either via text messaging or by video conferencing. Rapid evolution in the field of technology has literally changed the way we used to see or understand certain concepts. Nowadays, any software suite comprising every single tool or application which nurtures and promotes enterprise collaboration is referred to as the Contributor Platform.

Before moving towards a concise definition, let’s remind you that the concept of a collaboration platform is not new at all. You might have used email, instant messaging, discussion forums, groupware and other software alike, in the past. All of these were the applications of a productivity-based collaborative concept. You have been using it in one or another form without knowing the very basic nature of it.

What Exactly is a Contributor Platform?
Truly, there is no definition precise enough to contain the scope of a collaboration platform of 2019. Basically, it’s a carefully thought-out and a well-developed software which consists of different integral modules each adding more business value to the core application. Also known in the development circles as the “contributor platform”, it contains within every single functionality which is needed by the software development teams to successfully turn their coolest of the ideas into a fully functional app. These platforms ensure seamless communication, information management, quick task distribution, quality testing, and bug-free error reporting.

CrowdSourcer.io - An Introductory Insight:

CrowdSourcer.io or CrowdSourcer.io is not just an ordinary collaboration platform rather it’s jam-packed with a variety of vastly accredited enterprise resource management tools thus making it an outstanding software suite. It’s a perfect alternative crowdsourcing portal with a unique business model which allows the users to:

Either create their own projects and let their development team do the work.
Or to join in on existing projects as contributors, coordinate with the project manager, complete the assigned tasks, submit your code and get paid handsomely.

Over the course of time, technopreneurs have realized that wasting money in setting up a physical environment is not necessary so why waste the hard-earned money? Why not create an entirely unique, sustainable and a new model for the start-ups, which focuses primarily on contribution, collaboration, and profit-sharing? This laid the premise for the CrowdSourcer.io which is now running successfully in the market and is proving its potential.

CrowdSourcer.io - Bringing Talent to Where it Belongs:
For project managers, hunting the right talent is quite a difficult task. In most of the cases, the talent pool is quite limited and they can’t hire the right person for the right job. Remember, it’s an era of perfection and you can’t compromise on the core value of your application. You need someone with skills and a “go-getting” attitude. If you are unable to land the best out there, your product is worth nothing.

To make the situation even worse, human resource managers turn to several freelancing platforms. They post a job and within a few minutes, their inbox is stormed with dozens of messages and resumes. Each applicant trying his level best to portray himself as the next Linus Torvalds but when the time comes, many of these guys are not as good as they project themselves in their cover letters. They are just looking for a big break considering the fact that every role related to the field of software development, pays well. Consequently, the project managers have to pay them the money for a dirty code which is not even usable.

This predicament has been resolved by CrowdSourcer.io in an efficient manner. It involves a project manager who creates a project and within a matter of a few minutes, his team hops on as well. Just in case there arises a need for more developers, the free slots are mentioned under every project for the people to see. A developer after checking out all the introductory documents of the project, if he thinks he is quite the right fit for the job, joins the team after getting approved by the project manager. A list of tasks is assigned to him with a turnaround time as well. After completing a certain module, he submits the code and once approved, the developer gets paid his fair share. No hustle, just work!

If you inspect the other side of the story and consider the amount of effort a good developer puts in, in order to land a long-term client, it is also reduced to zero. Even more so, a developer contributing to a project hosted at Crowdsourcer.io, enjoys the liberty to choose his own working hours. That’s the beauty of CrowdSourcer.io that it connects the like-minded people who are willing to work on their ideas and eventually, share the profit. It’s a win-win.

CrowdSourcer.io is Free!
There is not a single platform in today’s digital landscape which doesn’t charge a hefty fee from employers and freelancers alike. Suppose an organization has hired a developer via a freelancing platform. Soon after releasing the first milestone, the employer will be charged with a certain fee. The moment the said developer receives the payment, a certain percentage ranging from 10% - 20% will be deducted in the name of “service charges”. And it doesn’t stop here. When the same developer will initiate a withdrawal request, the platform will deduct the transaction fee from the escrow to the checking account.

On the other hand, CrowdSourcer.io is absolutely free and it works on a commission-based repayment structure. It means that you will only be paying the transaction costs once your application will start generating revenue.

Final Words:
To sum it up, the CrowdSourcer.io is altogether a unique collaboration platform that aims to create a productive development environment where everyone has the ability to comprehend the sanctity of responsibility. CrowdSourcer.io, a user-friendly platform that it is, has been developed for you to turn your dream ideas into a reality without fearing less about the financial risks.