ProfitBrite

Free Coupons

Free Clorox Samples, Free Gift Cards, Free This, Free That. Every one of you probably know what I'm talking about and have all seen it before: The infamous, or in some cases famous "Internet Freebie Ads".

I'm talking about the ad that claims you can receive a free $1000 Gift Card to blow at BestBuy or something. A free TV delivered right to your door step. Now I know what you're thinking: "Oh no, not this rubbish". Well hang on for a bit because I have a little story to tell.

Once upon a time there was me: I was a naive know-it-all who ran AdBlock. I thought these ads were complete rubbish. There was NO WAY someone could be giving away something of that value for free. After seeing numerous people starting to claim success stories with these ads, being Mr.Detective and everything, I had a case to make. I went to find out how these offers worked. I found some very interesting results:

This is how they work

I apply for my 50" TV from company XY. Now company XY has to pay for this somehow, so they forward offers from other companies for me to fill out, but here's what people don't realize. There is a huge amount of offers that don't cost a penny.

How can companies afford to give away free products of such value? Simple. Repeat customers, recognition, and public relations. Think of it this way; They get a lot more repeat customers from giving away $500 then they would with giving away $5000 to a television network.

So when you think of it, there's another bonus here:

Not only did I receive my $1000 gift certificate in the mail, but I also received free samples of often very useful products. In my case Netflix: It cost me nothing and I was able to watch free movies in high definition for an entire month. Free, Zip.

The misconception is that these offers cost money. Although some do there are plenty of free ones. Payed offers CAN be canceled and you generally receive credits. Don't write paid ones off just yet though; There are actually many useful ones out there.

Here is an example of an offer sign up:

[Main Page]
First Name:
ZIP:
Email Address:
--------------

This example above would be quick and easy. Why? It asks very minimal information at the start; The less information, the better in terms of speed. Generally offers with greater rewards have more lengthy sign up sheets, so it is completely subjective to the offer. I personally like short ones because I can rapidly test offers to find which ones work.

But we still face one problem. There are bad offers, and there are good offers. How do I spot the difference? How do I know if they will pay? How long will it take?

Well, there really isn't a way to know for sure other than signing up. Many years have passed with minimal sign ups due to this reason, but I have very good news:

In the past 6 months there has been an explosion of organizations dedicated to finding the best coupon offers. Which ones work, which ones don't, how much they cost, how long they take. Although these resources aren't widely known they certainly exist.

What currently seems to be the most up to date page is a site called [http://www.couponfork.com/]CouponFork. It is the third I have seen, but probably best quality site I have found on my journey. CouponFork changes up offers on a regular basis, reflecting to ones that work well, but the site really isn't an offer database. It is a review site. As you will see they post reviews of many different offers circulating the internet, and only good ones, although they have a page of failed offers if you are interested for whatever reason. [http://www.couponfork.com/]CouponFork is well worth checking out if you are looking for working free offers.

I can probably go on much longer, but the just of the story is not to write off free offers completely, because there are most certainly some legitimate ones out there.

I have grown up in North Carolina but have moved around since then.

Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Free-Coupons&id=4676798] Free Coupons

The Netflix Challenge - A $1 Million-Worth Crowdsourcing Project

Tens of thousands of people from all over the world started working on this task right away, and each day teams submitted their updated solutions to the Netflix Prize Web page. Netflix instantly calculated how much better than Cinematch they were. Even if there were so many people working on the challenge, it took almost three years before a team came up with results that surpassed the 10% barriers. The winner was BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, a seven-person team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE RESULTS The Netflix contest was largely followed not just because of the $1 million prize, but because of its lessons which could extend well beyond improving movie recommendations. The data base made available by Netflix for this competition -over 100 million ratings that more than 480,000 users gave to nearly 18,000 movies- was one of the largest real-life data sets available for research. The outcome of this project is most valuable, as a large-scale predictive model can be applied across the fields of science, commerce and politics.

APPLICATIONS: CROWDSOURCING -A MODEL WITH GREAT POTENTIAL The Netflix contest is another project that proves how effective crowdsourcing can be. Before launching this challenge that was open to everyone out there in the crowd, Netflix's founders had tried for years to improve their software, with only incremental results. So, in this case, the most efficient way of solving the task was neither hiring a highly qualified professional to do the job, nor outsourcing the task (employ a third party to solve the task), but crowdsourcing it.

The progression of the results that were achieved and the way teams came together, especially in the last part of the contest, suggest that this kind of Internet-enabled approach, known as crowdsourcing, can be applied to complex business and scientific challenges.

The blending of different statistical and machine-learning techniques "only works well if you combine models that approach the problem differently," said Chris Volinsky, a scientist at AT&T Research and a leader of the Bellkor team. "That's why collaboration has been so effective, because different people approach problems differently."

Another detail that is very relevant to the power of crowdsourcing is that among the top teams there were not only academic researchers, but also laymen with no prior exposure to collaborative filtering, who were virtually learning the problem space from scratch.

CROWDSOURCING BENEFITS So, we can see that the benefits of crowdsourcing that I enlisted in my previous post apply in this case too. I said there that one benefit of crowdsourcing for the organization is that it can tap a wide range of talent that might not be present in its own organization. And, on the consumer's side, the benefit is that crowdsourcing opens the door for virtual unknowns in their fields to gain large-scale recognition for their talents. And that is exactly what happened in this case too.

Another benefit of crowdsourcing that I enlisted was that many crowdsourcing projects offer the participants the chance to win or earn money. And $1 million is a very attractive prize! And, at the same time, crowdsourcing offers organizations the benefit of having problems explored at comparatively little cost. One million dollars might sound like an awfully big prize for such a small improvement. But in fact, as I mentioned earlier, Netflix's founders had tried to improve their software for years, with only insignificant results, and they knew that a 10% bump would be a challenge for even the most deft programmer. They also knew that getting to 10 percent would certainly be worth well in excess of $1 million to the company. And then, if you think of all the people that entered the competition and spent time on trying to solve the problem, the cost comes down to somewhere around $20 per person.

CONCLUSION In conclusion, the Netflix challenge is another very good example of the great potential crowdsourcing has. The Netflix prize seems to have been particularly well-designed to encourage collaboration and sharing, which may be the key to effective crowdsourcing.

HOW TO EARN MONEY WITH CROWDSOURCING POWER

If you are interested in finding more about a crowdsourcing project you can earn money with go to [http://crowdsourcingpower.com/]crowdsourcingpower.com

Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?The-Netflix-Challenge---A-$1-Million-Worth-Crowdsourcing-Project&id=3947555] The Netflix Challenge - A $1 Million-Worth Crowdsourcing Project