Spotlighting Companies and the People that Run them

We're in the video age. Millions of videos have flooded the web. Tens of thousands more are added every day.  The problem is finding the best ones. Current rating systems don't work: one 5-star rating can push a video to the top of the heap. Is that fair?  And a video with 100,000 views seems better than one with 100. Is it?

CrowdRules, released in Beta today at www.crowdrules.com, has solved the problem.
CrowdRules is a free, do-it-yourself contest system with honest voting.  It works by aggregating the wisdom of its members using a video-based question and answer format. Videos from anywhere on the Internet can be included. Support for text, photos, news, blogs, podcasts and audio will be added in the full release.

"We're a crowd-powered recommendation engine," says David Moss, CEO of Transilient Media, Inc., the creators of CrowdRules. Moss was founding CIO of Edmunds.com, and was also President of Threshold Sound, a music television company, and also worked for Oracle. The CrowdRules team includes other dotcom and Oracle veterans.

CrowdRules members team up as "crowds" and create contests, called "challenges". The challenge system is useful wherever fair and accurate results are needed. Uses include audience testing, auditions, band battles, film festivals, market research, mash-up contests, poetry slams, political ad testing, talent searches, video resume reviews, and more. "The only limit is your imagination," says Moss.

Here's how it works. Members challenge their crowd to find the best of something, say the best news videos of the past 24 hours.  Anyone in the crowd can submit videos to answer that challenge. CrowdRules then selects videos for crowd members to rate. Information cascades - things that bias voting - are blocked. That means members can't find out how others have voted.  They don't know the number of views, or how others have rated a video.  They can't send a link to game the vote. And all videos get an equal number of votes.  When voting ends, results are aggregated into a ranked list.

"CrowdRules is a professional system for discovering the best content and talent. We designed it for talent agencies, ad agencies, television and film studios, record labels, and political campaigns," says Moss. "Then we realized that something this useful should be available for everyone to use. So we put it on the Internet for free!"

Business models include sponsorships, advertising, and analytics. CrowdRules has a number of features planned to enhance business and everyday use.  The voting system is patent-pending.