Earlier this week I spoke with the people behind Guerra Creativa, an interesting Latin American crowdsourcing community for design services. I learned why it is a creative community more than a contest website, that logo contests are proven to be most successful, and that the community is growing fast with more than 3.400 creatives now.

What prompted the idea behind Guerra Creativa? What’s your vision?

The idea of creating a company like Guerra Creativa came to us when we realized that thousands of companies are getting started in business, needing to create their logos and websites, but not all of them can afford renowned design studios. We believe in crowdsourcing and that’s why we started Guerra Creativa. It gives everybody the opportunity to have access to a service that provides a large variety of quality designs at a good prize.

What has happened since starting up?

Guerra Creativa has attracted more then 3.400 creatives, who already uploaded more than 11.000 designs! We added a community to our platform and every day we’re working on the improvement of our website.

How do you differentiate from competitors like crowdSPRING, 99designs…?

Guerra Creativa offers a world wide community to all our users where they can interact and learn from each other. We are giving every user the power to show the world what they can do, to develop their skills and to have fun, make new friends, and some money. In Guerra Creativa everyone can say what they like, give an opinion or just show their work. We have launched a new section that allows all of our users to get exclusive tutorials, with step-to-step instructions of different techniques and some good advices from our Interactive Creative Director Alberto “Kaiser” Sosa.

We are not just a contest website, we are a Creative Community.

Which design contests are proven to be most successful?

We have seen lots of different contests in Guerra Creativa since it was launched. Till now the logo contests are the most successful, as they attract a huge number of entries and a great amount of proposals within a short period of time. Besides the logo contests, we also see special requests coming in for T-shirt designs and CD-covers.

What have you learned so far?

We had people starting contests from all over the world, like Argentina, United Kingdom, New Zealand, France, Austria, Brazil, Netherlands, Belgium, United States, China and Spain. The main reason for launching a contest on our website is the great amount of high quality designs for a reasonable price.

Our creatives mostly come from Latin America and for them what counts is the combination of learning, getting in touch with other creatives and finding interesting work opportunities. This drives them to Guerra Creativa everyday!

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Are you one of those who have never quite managed to set foot into the virtual world of Second Life? Why? Because you thought your ‘first life’ is just about enough as it is and you’ve just never seen the point in spending your time and money to buy virtual clothing and real estate? Well, just a few days ago, I was one of you. Then this commentary is about to open your eyes on how virtual worlds are apt to change the way online collaboration is done and what the future of open innovation is going to look like.

Ever since I had access to the internet I was fascinated by the possibilities of a connected world, laying just a few mouse-clicks away. However, not only has the internet heavily evolved but also has my usage profile of the web changed overtime. From my first homepage to addictively playing online games, from spending a ’second life’ in social networks to business networking nowadays, I dedicated at least a googol of hours to the internet.

Second Life: Technology of the future or a dying hype?

A few trends though passed me untouched, some of which were UseNet celebrities, online casinos - and virtual worlds. When Linden Lab’s “Second Life” went online in the summer of 2003 I couldn’t have cared less. The technology was coarse; especially the graphics were ugly, the inherent social network way too unfocused and the idea of meeting people that substitute their insufficient real life for a virtual life was not exactly tempting. I just didn’t see the point.

IBM employees experienced the phenomenon of 'immersion'

Six years later, this summer in the German online business platform Xing, I stumbled upon a group in which the possibilities of virtual worlds in business environments are discussed. In one of these discussions, Matthias Eichhoff (Director of Marketing at Second Interest AG) pointed out that virtual worlds are more and more becoming a superior surrogate to video conferences for companies. As participants will eventually build up a commitment to the place and its virtual people, meetings in virtual worlds were apt to replace video conferencing and eventually a lot of business travel.
At first I was very skeptical: As long as the virtual characters just plainly stand next to each other with text bubbles popping up upon their heads and now and then performing a pre-scripted dance move, video conferencing will remain the only substitute for “traditional” business meetings. But after reading about IBM successfully holding its 2008 world conference in a virtual world, I was not so sure about that…
The case study states that people waking up in the morning after the virtual meetings felt like they had actually attended a real meeting in which they interacted with others and carried home practical information.

It seems that immersion really does do the trick, even though graphics are coarse and interaction limited. So by that point I was becoming increasingly interested in virtual worlds. In my mind a vision about the possibilities of online collaboration in virtual worlds started to develop. If only the man-machine-interface would be better. If only gestures and emotions could be seamlessly transferred to the virtual world. What makes face-to-face interaction irreplaceable are gestures and facial expressions. To me, this seemed to be the limiting factor. It is not until some kind of hyper-modern sensor, capable of registering complete body movements and facial expressions in real-time, is available to consumers that virtual worlds will become truly invaluable to companies.

Project Natal: Is this what the future of online collaboration looks like?

Yet, in rare occasions, the future has already begun. In June 2009, Microsoft drew major attention to its newest prodigy, Project Natal, on the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2009. The tagline runs something like this: “Leave your game controller at home when you go over to your friend’s house to play Xbox, ‘cause with Project Natal you won’t need it anymore.” That’s great for gamers around the world, really cool…

Yesterday Verbeterdebuurt.nl was launched in the Netherlands. Inspired by the British FixMyStreet, citizens in the Netherlands can now indicate problems and ideas concerning their street and neighbourhood - going from broken lighting poles to litter. Coming out of closed beta, the 100th issue was also reported yesterday during the launch (FixMyStreet currently reports about 1,000 issues per week in the UK).

The initiative is led by CreativeCrowds, and supported by Digital Pioneers. By crowdsourcing problems directly from citizens, towns and villages get a better view on what is happening, reducing the reaction lead times. “Problems” are forwarded right away to the right government body, whereas an “idea” needs 10 supporters to get it sent through. On FixMyStreet about 45% of the problems are actually solved! (see reports) Public crowdsourcing initiatives are gaining ground rapidly, and I trust in later stages the platform might be linked to ‘good corporate citizen’/CSR programs as well. Do you have a similar service in your country or region? What’s your experience/opinion?