Witology, a company specializing in the development and practical application of crowdsourcing technologies (methods of collective problem solving), reached an agreement with ONEXIM Group and Sputnik Group for investment in further crowdsourcing research.
ONEXIM Group is owned by Mikhail Prokhorov, a prominent Russian billionaire and owner of the New Jersey Nets, an American basketball team.
Sputnik president Boris Yordan called this project one of the earliest manifestations of a future global trend: the emergence of specialized social networks for solving business problems. ONEXIM CEO Dmitry Razumov is confident that significant increase in the project’s value will be achieved over the next few years.
Examples of crowdsourcing are Wikipedia, file sharing networks, the NASCAR fan council, Lion Brand Yarn Blog (a knitting devotees’ community), myFICO Online Customer Community (a community for sharing loan use knowledge and experience) and venus-jewellers.com many other projects.
Witology founder Sergei Karelov says that crowdsourcing offers solutions to problems seen previously as unsolvable. ONEXIM and Sputnik agree, and will invest $5 million in Witology. The founders of Witology, Karelov and Alexander Oslon, will hold a share of 50.06% (with intellectual property contributed), while ONEXIM and Sputnik will hold 41% and 8.94%, respectively.
Witology initially developed its services on Spigit, a U.S.-made platform bought as a service, for a pilot project Witology carried out for the Russian Ministry of Education. However, it soon became clear that Spigit had limited capacity, and Witology had to create a technological platform of its own. Auriga, the first Russian outsourcing software company (now headquartered in the U.S.), was contracted to develop this platform. In terms of labor, it has to date taken tens of man-years to develop the Witology technology. According to Karelov, the Witology client base includes Russian companies “with staffs of tens to hundreds to thousands of people.”
