Juliana Rotich maps the future with Ushahidi #designindaba

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Juliana Rotich, a speaker at Design Indaba 2014, has a remarkable eye. Show her a map of undersea broadband cables connecting to Africa, and she points out that they still follow the sea routes that helped make Africa a continent of colonies not so many decades ago.

Springleap – design crowd with marketing muscle

How do you turn a T-shirt company into a powerful marketing play? You provide access to your pool of 17 000 designers to brands needing beautiful and relevant content (through design) and utilise your social media skills and significant global crowd source loving fan base of course.

That’s just what Eran Eyal and his team at Springleap.com has been doing and so far the results have been positive.

The Springleap team has been proving their concept using the best possible case study – themselves – having grown Facebook their fan base 6000 to 193 000 in less than a year (it’s now closing in on the 200k mark). Eyal says at one stage he was testing 600 different Facebook ads to figure out best practice and what achieves the most success.

At its core sits 17 000 designers who submit designs to Springleap.com – these designs are then voted on by its community and as many friends as the designers can pull through their own networks to the site. The winners receive a cash prize and royalties from the resulting product, usually a T-shirt. Sales are handled by Springleap. Eyal looked at this talent pool and their social pull and realised it could be a powerful asset to activate design and brand fans.

Idea Bounty eyes UK future

Idea Bounty crowdsources creative ideas. Organisations put out a pitch, thousands of creative minds from around the globe conceptualise possible campaigns, Idea Bounty shifts through the deluge and places the best ideas before their client. Client picks, creative get anything from $1 000 – $10 000 for their concept, which client now owns.

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