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Wipro logs on to 'crowdsourcing' mode

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: IT outsourcing major Wipro Technologies has started off with crowdsourcing by asking the page viewers to decide on their homepage theme. The company is looking forward to introducing the concept for white papers and featured articles as well.

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The visitors of the Wipro Technologies homepage will be provided with an option to vote for their preferred homepage themes. The option with the majority of the votes would be highlighted on the homepage.

Jessie Paul, chief marketing officer at Wipro Technologies, said, “Normally corporate homepage do not change for a long time. Changing of the homepage is more to make the experience interactive. The idea behind the website was that we would have multiple designs and keep changing it; and we thought that it would be better to ask the viewers to decide on their choice.”

She elaborated that the themes will be decided from the Wipro perspective, like green computing, co-evolution, cloud, unified collaboration and many more. The homepage will be refreshed in every two weeks. The first page was uploaded on August 16, 2009, with a theme of Grassroot thinking, with a picture of bladed grass.

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According to Muki Regunathan, founder and CEO of Pepper Square, a web development and user interface designing company, the homepage theme images were sourced from Flickr. He mentioned in his microblog that the "Grassroot thinking" concept created by Jyothi Kiran, who is a creative writer and the image was shot by Sowmya from Bangalore.

Paul added, “Currently, we are following this concept for the pictures because it is based on crowd flicker, which is true 'crowdsourcing', but in the back-end we are also working at highlighting the featured articles based on the poll. So far, on our website, the white papers are highlighted on the number of downloads, but we could make that process more transparent.

She informed that other features of this new website is that companies can share their bookmarks.

As Wikipedia defines, crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.

Many companies are progressively looking at crowdsourcing to engage their customers and make more interactive; like in 2008, Cisco Systems had held a contest-I-Prize-for the parties to showcase innovative business plans using collaborative technologies. According to reports, more than 2,500 people from around 104 countries participated in the competition.

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