CrowdSourcing Repetitive Tasks: CrowdFlower Founder Lukas Biewald (Part 4)

Sramana: You mentioned that eBay is one of your customers. What do you do for eBay? Lukas Biewald: We do a lot of different things for them. The most mature application for them is classifying products. They get a lot of products in from their users, and they want to make sure they are going

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CrowdSourcing Repetitive Tasks: CrowdFlower Founder Lukas Biewald (Part 3)

Sramana: What is your business model? Lukas Biewald: Our business model is pretty simple. We quote customers the price for completed tasks, and upon completing those tasks recieve payment regardless of the cost we incur competing those tasks. We assume the price risk. Let’s suppose a company has a large directory of other businesses and

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CrowdSourcing Repetitive Tasks: CrowdFlower Founder Lukas Biewald (Part 2)

Sramana: When you first recognized the concept of croudsourcing was working, what stood out at you the most? What about it make you recognize its overall potential? Lukas Biewald: When you get thousands of people looking at your site or your data, you will get a lot of interesting ideas. They will point out confusing

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Crowdsourcing Repetitive Tasks: CrowdFlower Founder Lukas Biewald (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Lukas Biewald is the founder and executive chairman of CrowdFlower, the world’s largest enterprise crowdsourcing platform. Prior to co-founding CrowdFlower, Lukas was a senior scientist and manager within the ranking and management team at Powerset, Inc., a natural language search technology company later acquired by Microsoft.

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How To Build A Strong IP Portfolio: rPost CEO Zafar Khan (Part 7)

Sramana: In your history of the 11 years, have you litigated using these patents offensively before now? Zafar Khan: Yes. As the market becomes more interesting with shorter sales cycles, it is natural that more people want to get into the marketplace. We are trying to make it more well known that we are the

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How To Build A Strong IP Portfolio: rPost CEO Zafar Khan (Part 6)

Sramana: Going back to the beginning of your company, at what point did you start considering and filing for patents? It is expensive to go through the legal process of filing for patents and getting them approved. Zafar Khan: It is a very expensive experience, not just from the aspect of filing for the patents

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How To Build A Strong IP Portfolio: rPost CEO Zafar Khan (Part 5)

Sramana: How has your company progressed through 2011? What has your growth rate been? Zafar Khan: We raised our first private capital in 2001. We raised capital through a number of private financings over the course of time. We signed on the U.S. Government Accountability Office as our first government customer in 2003.

How To Build A Strong IP Portfolio: rPost CEO Zafar Khan (Part 4)

Sramana: What was the go to market strategy that you followed beyond your guerilla marketing efforts? How did you drive greater user adoption? Zafar Khan: For Registered Email we focused on a global business plan and devised a strategy to make our service the global business standard. We wanted to be the international standard for

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