Why Crowdsourcing is the Next Cloud Computing

Grazed from Wired.  Author: Alpheus Bingham.

Few would dispute the enormous impact that cloud computing has had on the technology and business landscape during the past decade. In 2001, the approach to hosting business applications on the emerging web wasn’t even remotely proven and, in fact, had failed because the first generation of web-hosted application service providers (ASPs) got it all wrong.

But over the course of a decade, what we now call cloud-based or software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications has taken the world by storm and become mainstream. Today, cloud computing is an umbrella term that applies to a wide variety of successful technologies (and business models), from business apps like Salesforce.com, to infrastructure like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), to consumer apps like Netflix. It took years for all these things to become mainstream, and if the last decade saw the emergence (and eventual dominance) of the cloud over previous technologies and models, this decade will see the same thing with crowdsourcing…

Both an art and a science, crowdsourcing taps into the global experience and wisdom of individuals, teams, communities, and networks to accomplish tasks and work. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you live, or what you do or believe — in fact, the more diversity of thought and perspective, the better. Diversity is king and it’s common for people on the periphery of — or even completely outside of — a discipline or science to end up solving important problems…

Read more from the source @ http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/why-crowdsourcing-is-the-next-cloud-computing#axzz2hZMVZYpP