Week 2 - "Crowdsourcing" & "How to Build Your Start-Up without Building Code"

This week, I read “How to Build Your Start-up Without Building Code”, which I found interesting because I recently setup my own website and I am clueless about using HTML code.  I built my website using Wix, which I found to be very user-friendly.  I did run into a couple of limitations with regards to aesthetics that I wanted to change but couldn’t such as customizing the web addresses of my subpages or locking side panels in place without creating an entire backdrop.  Overall, I am still pleased with the way that my site came out but I often wonder, how much more of what I wanted could have been done with code and how much time that would have taken to design my entire site that way.  However, I also like the fact that I can change my site at any time vs. having to work with a programmer whenever I want to make changes.

I also read “The Dawn of the Human Network” from Crowdsourcing and watched the blogtv’s “Crowdsourcing Evolution”.  The concept of crowdsourcing was something that I had previously misunderstood and mistook for “crowdfunding”.  It was very interesting to learn what crowdsourcing really is and to gain more information about the concept behind it.  This is also something that I look forward to incorporating into my own business in the future.  Since we don’t have a problem to solve in the traditional sense, this will be a challenge that I’m looking forward to thinking through along with other ways to engage visitors of JukeRelated.com.

The Camtasia video on Information Liquidity didn’t peak my interest as much as the other material in the class.  I found it to be an alternative way to look at business models, but I like the way that the “Business Model Generation” book classifies them better.  The video on “The Internet before Search Engines” was cool because my earliest memory of the internet was getting AOL in 1997; I never knew that there was internet before that. I couldn’t really understand how it worked because it seemed like it had to link to other institutions that had the internet so I’m guessing that the access to data and information was just limited because there were no search engines then.  It actually reminded me of the first computer at my grandmother’s house that used MS-DOS.  Very cool to look back and see how far we have come with technology.