Easy Design and Crowdsourcing.

Here is a look at a few websites, part of the marketplace for Crowdsourcing, the practice of obtaining needed services or content by soliciting contribution from a large group of people online. On one side is the business community relying on a vast pool of freelancers who in turn are eager to profit from this opportunity.

In need of a design, logo, etc. You should definitely check www.99designs.com. It’s a marketplace for crowd sourced designs. Like other crowd sourcing market places, it works on a contest level. You basically send an offer to get a design and you will be able to choose one offered by many different graphic artists, but you’ll end up paying only for the one you choose.

It was founded by Australian Patrick Llewellyn out of an older company called sitepoint.com It took four years for the company to get to 100,000 contests but is now way over this number. The amount of money it’s paying out to designers is on the same trajectory: The company paid out $29 million to designers in the first four years of its life, and expects to pay another $25 million to designers this year. The number of design contests being run on the site has doubled year-over-year as well.

Some other companies like www.Elance.com lets you hire freelancers for all kind of different tasks. www.Topcoder.com specializes in crowd sourcing software developers and in the scientific sphere the website www.innocentive.com match top R&D companies with scientists.