The next step in Crowdsourcing has arrived

Crowdsourcing site generator Evly opens shop.

One of the more popular topics in online media nowadays is Crowdsourcing . Sparked by recent Crowdsourcing campaigns initiated by large companies such as Lays (make your own flavor), Cisco (product development successes) and Pepsi, Crowdsourcing is increasingly utilized by companies all over the globe,  becoming a widely accepted tool for  sourcing resources, knowledge and network.

Last week I had a call with Eran Eyal, co-founder of evly. evly is the only software as a service (SaaS) of its kind which allows people to build their own Crowdsourcing platform in a matter of minutes. A fantastic idea, which could mean that persons can own a full fledge crowdsourcing platform for free. Further contributing to the dispersion of Crowdsourcing.

evly took a novel approach – they soft launched on 22 November, releasing a limited amount of "build tokens" every day to help crowdsource the bugs and improvements for the official launch in February next year. Every day they release between 5-9 build tokens a day to beta testers, with a list of over 2000 requests already from eager crowdsource site builders. Eran was kind enough to provide us with such a build token to test drive the software, so we did.

After registering, it only took 15 minutes to drag and drop a fully functional Crowdsourcing site. Although the generator still suffers from some bugs (remember, it is only a Beta version), the system is easy to use for non programmers, making the act of Crowdsourcing easier than ever before.  Take a look at the end result.

Interestingly the “add widget functionality” allows evly users to offer out of the box functionality on their evly sites. Widgets such as a placement of Twitter streams and other relevant additional functionality make this generator a very nice product. evly took the high road by offering supportive software to publish  Crowdsourcing campaigns online, doing so the South African company made a brilliant move in taking the act of Crowdsourcing to a mainstream audience . I truly think that we will see a tremendous increase in the number of Crowdsourcing campaigns, especially now people can make their own sites in only a matter of minutes using evly.

A second follow-up with co-founder Eran Eyal revealed : "We have been getting amazing responses from all over the globe. Our current emphasis is to clean out the bugs over the next 2 weeks and build amazing UX to compliment all the powerful features in the platform. We want to make it super simple – to lower the learning curve to the point of intuition."

I for one am very impressed with the initial Beta product, evly’s vision and the people behind the company. I do recommend all readers to check out the site and evly’s generator. Let me know what you think or show Crowdfundnews readers your evly page via Twitter (tweet to @crowdfundnews).

Kind regards,

Thomas Crowd 

The next step in Crowdsourcing has arrived