The document discusses how crowdsourcing and virtual workforces can help companies overcome challenges with traditional project teams. It argues that relying on a global community of independent contractors working competitively reduces the risks of delays or failure compared to using in-house teams with single points of failure. Examples are given of companies that have partnered with TopCoder to crowdsource software development, data analysis and other tasks by running them as online competitions.

1. Crowdsourcing Harnessing the Benefits of a Virtual Workforce Michael Morris Senior Vice President TopCoder, Inc

2. [ ] What is Crowd Sourcing? 2 © Copyright 2008, TopCoder, Inc.

3. [ ] What is Virtual Work? 3 © Copyright 2008, TopCoder, Inc. “ A Community of Non-Affiliated Individuals Working Collectively and Individually to Create Value”

4. [ ] Global Collaboration © Copyright 2008, TopCoder, Inc. This can be your project team. 4

6. [ ] The Old Way 6 © Copyright 2008, TopCoder, Inc. Success Tasks

8. [ ] The New Way 8 © Copyright 2008, TopCoder, Inc. Success Tasks

9. [ ] The New Way 9 © Copyright 2008, TopCoder, Inc. Success Resources

10. [ ] Competition Makes it all Work 10 © Copyright 2008, TopCoder, Inc. “ Value can be extracted when top performance is the only thing rewarded”

11. [ ] Plug Directly Into the Power © Copyright 2008, TopCoder, Inc. You now have the power to directly access our Global Community of software developers and graphic artists, who are ready to compete to design your web project. 11

12. [ ] Plug Directly Into the Power © Copyright 2008, TopCoder, Inc. 12

13. [ ] Driving Innovation © Copyright 2008, TopCoder, Inc. ESPN – The best programmers in the world get their hands on the most comprehensive college football game data ever compiled! How will your algorithm stack up against the competition? Truveo – Truveo set the top developers in the world loose with the APIs to search and index a hundred million video clips and challenge you to build the next great video Truveo application. Open AIM – AOL has teamed up with TopCoder to put the Open AIM APIs in the hands of the best developers in the world. 13

14. [ ] Thank You © Copyright 2008, TopCoder, Inc. Let the world compete… on your next application www.topcoder.com 95 Glastonbury Boulevard Glastonbury, CT 06033 TEL (860) 633 5540 FAX (860) 657 4276