I don’t think that I would consider myself living under a rock. But last week I heard about this little Google site called: prizes.org. A site that Google started that basically hooks ideas and ‘experts’ together – and pays! Say you have a buddy getting married, or you need some help planning a vacation to say, Hayward, Wisconsin or any other topic this could be your ticket to gold.
source: prizes.org
There are some others like 99designs.com who crowdsources logo design. But prizes.org is the closest to taking what my pal Bruce Elgort has in IdeaJam and extending to paying people to collaborate. I find it odd that for most of these topics you could head to Quora.com and get many of them answered for free – but I am the last person to judge people for paying for something one can get or do for free. I have always said that people love to share their ideas and solutions and hence why social business software like IBM Connections, Chatter, Jive and such are great enterprise tools. My mom always said, never say “you should…” – well now you can – and get paid.
I have used 99designs.com in the past, and it’s great. You set your own price you’re willing to pay for design work, and you usually get quite a few submissions. If you’re willing to pay a few hundred dollars or more for something like a logo, you’d be surprised how many submissions you often get on that site, and the quality of some of them. I’ll check out prizes.org. I had not heard of it yet.