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Crowd-sourcing: it's a term that's being thrown around a lot these days by marketers and journalists alike to describe the increasing trend of using Web 2.0 and social media to achieve business goals. The official definition as stated by the term's founder, Jeff Howe, is “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.” For example, unpaid or low-paid amateurs can be asked to develop a new technology, carry out a design assignment or construct a marketing campaign for the company.