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Crowdsourcing is not only used for relatively simple tasks such as designing a Web site or designing a case for a smartphone. Today, it is increasingly being used in more complex designs as well. Precyse Technologies provides supply-chain products and solutions that assist organizations in tracking their inventories using RFID technology. It was having difficulty improving the performance and battery life of a particular RFID device; there were not adequate internal resources to tackle the problem. So, Precyse asked InnoCentive, a crowdsourcing provider, for assistance, believing that crowdsourcing would provide quick access to a worldwide talent pool and a higher return on investment (ROI). Ultimately, the company received more than 300 ideas from global experts for solving its problem. It narrowed the pool down to three finalists, from which a winner was chosen. The whole process took approximately four months, and Precyse estimated that it saved the company $250,000.

Answer the following questions:

1. What are some typical applications of crowdsourcing?
2. What are some advantages of crowdsourcing?
3. How could crowd-sourcing reduce the systems design cost?
4. Are there certain problems you would not want to use crowdsourcing to solve?