Today, I started working on my thesis. I sent out some emails to various people asking them for assistance and/or (hopefully helpful) tips. I got a really quick & valuable reply from Mr. Thomas Langeberg, who has been working on a paper called “Why Communities Work? Maven Orientation and the Determinants of Individual Level Information Sharing”. More info can be found here. However, I am still looking for more information on my topic of interest: crowdsourcing. More specifically, how to increase effectiveness of crowdsourcing initiatives & influence of reward structures on motivation to get involved in crowdsourcing initiatives. In case anyone has interesting comments or otherwise helpful insights to share, please contact me.

Best,

Mark

Nick Denton is the owner of (amongst other sites) Gawker, which is a hugely successful (and wonderfully tongue-in-cheek) site about NYC-gossip. He also has his own site. I guess there are a few lessons to be learned there for aspiring internet entrepreneurs like myself …so do yourself a favor and have a look. Some additional info on him is to be found here.

Check this out. Dutch serial internet entrepreneur Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten writes about what the names of some (new) apps mean in Dutch – pretty funny…

Check out this cool company! Their main product is t-shirts, which -by its self- is not that special. However, they let the customers design! A really good example of crowdsourcing. Everyone can submit a design, which is then reviewed and rated by other users – who can also express their wish to buy the shirt in case it will be produced. Once the company receives enough pre-orders the shirt is taken into production and the designer gets $1000 & his/her name printed on the label.

So far about 400 different designs have been produced, so you could say the owners are doing quite well for themselves . In case you like Threadless, check out its sister site Naked & Angry.

In case anyone is even reading this, I have just signed up at WordPress – it might take me some time to get this blog up and running. In the future, I hope to update it regularly with posts on interesting (internet-related) new ventures, start-ups, entrepreneurs, services, etc.

Please check in shortly for updates!

Ciao – Mark