Problem shared is a problem solved. That’s the theory behind crowdsourcing — people coming together to respond to demand for just about anything, from financial services and labor to information sharing and materials. A subset of that, crowdfunding — any finance that’s been aggregated online — is an exploding online marketplace that rang up a whopping $5 billion in transactions last year.
There’s just one problem: Opportunities in this “crowd economy” are growing at such a fast clip in number and variety that data analysis has lagged, leaving investors and industry wading into uncharted territory. As crowdfunding expands — revenue could hit $100 billion by 2018 if the annual doubling continues — the need to make sense of the trend grows along with it.
