Two of my close friends, Gil Weiss and Ben Horne, were identified as missing last month while climbing a new route in the Cordillera Blanca region in Peru.

Once friends sounded the alarms that Gil and Ben were overdue we all sprung into action. One friend was charged with calling the parents, one was charged with calling the embassy, another the airline, etc… My role was to deploy satellites to try to get a visual on where the guys were climbing (That's right, luckily I have access to a platform that uses satellites).

Crowdfunding is hot right now. You know it – you wouldn't be reading this website if you didn't. Everyone is talking about it. Whether it's the JOBS Act or good ol' fashion Kickstarter-style, everyone wants to get in on the craze. The easiest way is to perfect the art of niche cloning.

How exactly does crowdsourcing affects your business? In more ways that you'd think. As an innovative force, crowdsourcing shifts our attention from people to ideas. It breaks the egotism that says we, as leaders, always have to be at the center of our organization. What happens when you let your organization be driven by ideas?

Companies utilizing crowdsourcing should know that a consistent brand experience can be your best marketing friend. But a brand that has lost its way can also be your worst enemy. Crowdsourcing participants are seeking a consistently branded and engaging experience wherever they engage with your company or organization; whether it's online, in a community, in a retail store or at an event. You have to be religious about defining, designing and applying your brand.

You don’t hear that phrase "Traffic is Awesome" stated very often. However, the opportunity for crowdsourcing to have a huge impact on traffic and the way in which we navigate through it is immense. By definition, traffic affects a large group of people. Thus, if you could tap into what members of the group are experiencing, you can accurately map and track traffic conditions. This is a natural application of crowdsourcing.

In months prior, I have written about the ease at which new platforms are launched and the diversity of crowdfunding models and how they are accepted in Europe and the US. Reading those articles, you will probably know that I am sceptical about the booming development platforms and how they all consider themselves to be the financial infrastructures of the future.

For crowdsourcing purists, who sleep with copies of The Wisdom of Crowds under their pillows, the rise of the 'contest' model of crowdsourcing has been like watching an American remake of your favorite TV show: the characters may have the same names, but what made it special has gone (and where did that wisecracking robot-butler come from?).

Crowdsourcing has historically been defined from a business standpoint as little more than a series of one-off projects. Fortunately for all of us, there is an exciting sea-change underway for the crowdsourcing industry and we all need to be ready to embrace it!

Does microtasking have something to teach us about innovation?  David Alan Grier thinks so, and, in this month's video podcast, eloquently tells us exactly how.  Watch the video to learn how gold standard qualification tests & other crowdsourcing methodologies can improve how we innovate & understand how to predict the success of innovation.

By now you have probably heard the story of Karen Klein from Greece, New York. Karen is a bus monitor at the local middle school. On a recent trip, Karen was bullied by the children that she is hired to monitor. As happens so often in the age of Youtube, the entire episode was caught on a camera phone, uploaded to the Internet, and instantly went viral (8m views and 130k comments since June 19^th).