Paul Poutanen

I have been a member of Cambrian House for over a year now. If you look me up, I am fish99 and I am 6th on the leaderboard. (ie most glory points…a ranking system for doing stuff on the site)

In February, after lurking on the site for a while, I decided to add an idea.

The orginal name of the idea was “Mobile Phone Application Testing Service” (probably the most unsexy name I could think of….but it told what the idea did)

When I was at Blister Entertainment, I knew the difficulties in testing mobile applications. The cost was enormous… I estimated that each handset we tested on cost us between $1500 and $2000 depending on the cost of the handset and the data plan we needed. We needed to test in the countries, where the applications were to be launched, so we had to send testers, usually developers and technical people, to test with added cost. 

Working at Cambrian House, I loved the whole crowdsourcing concept.

In brainstorming, the ideas come out of putting two or more concepts together, to come up with a mashup. The idea of crowdsourcing and mobile sounded like a good fit, so I started thinking about it. Where were the problems in mobile and how could crowdsourcing help?

It kinda came to me slow but eventually the idea of crowd sourced mobile application testing came to mind. I found in the mobile space there were difficulties and cost with testing.

Tester bias was also a problem. If you send your developers out to test, you are going to get skewed results. If the person who wrote the application is testing, they tend to follow the same pattern in testing. For example, looking at a help screen in the middle of an application, does not happen if you wrote the code.

So the idea went up, and there were responses immediately. Some people loved it. Some hated it. There were suggestions. I did not know all of the answers right away but on thinking on responses helped me form the simple idea into a legitimate idea.

The bottom line is that the crowd helped me with fine-tuning the idea and the business model behind it.

The world of technology is changing everyday.

I see major trends in crowd-sourcing, and the mobile space.

A bit about myself.

I have been in the hi-tech area for over 20 years.

With 2 engineering degrees, I have 6 years experience as a senior management consultant with Ernst and Young.

I was at Wi-Lan (wireless communication) in the early days as director of applications and sales engineering, where we launched the largest educational wireless system in the world.

As director of tower management at Cell-Loc (location technology), we signed deals with 4 of the biggest tower companies in the USA.

At Blister Entertainment, www.blisterent.coma wholly owned subsidiary of Knowledgewhere www.knowledgewhere.com , we launched the first location based games on Mobile handsets in North America. The game Swordfish, won bast game in the Canadian New Media Awards in 2005.

As advisor to Cambrian House, www.cambrianhouse.com , it has been very interesting to be a part of a groundbreaking technology that uses the crowd to achieve their goals.

I am vice president of the Digital Media Association of Alberta.  www.digitalalberta.com

Now, as founder of Mob4Hire Inc., www.mob4hire.comwe intend to make the world easier for mobile application developers, through crowd-sourced mobile application testing.