uTest CMO Matt Johnston Discusses the Next Evolution in Crowdsourcing Models at the Crowdsortium Symposium

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - May 17, 2011) - uTest, the world's largest software testing marketplace, today announced that CMO Matt Johnston will be a featured speaker at the Crowdsortium Symposium, the Crowdsortium's inaugural conference dedicated to advancing the ever-changing and growing crowdsourcing industry. Johnston will be leading the discussion on the latest trends in community management on May 19^th at 1:50pm.

"The key to successfully employing a crowdsourcing model is to advance beyond the loosely affiliated, unstructured crowd -- a mob," said Matt Johnston, uTest CMO. "With 40,000 software testers across 175 countries in the uTest community, the challenge was figuring out how to manage, vet and engage such an enormous pool of talent. By enabling community-driven teaching and mentoring, uTest has created a highly scalable, self-sufficient, and self-policing crowdsourcing model."

Johnston is one of a select group of speakers chosen to present at the Crowdsortium Symposium. Other crowdsourcing leaders who will be presenting include CEO of Mahalo, Jason Calacanis; VP of Community Properties & Local at Yahoo!, Luke Beatty; and Scale Venture Partners' Sharon Wienbar.

In this session, Johnston will discuss what good community management is and what it isn't; the challenges of vetting, engaging, incenting and managing a massive global workforce; and how to 'use the crowd to manage the crowd' in order to make community management scale. Using real-world examples, Johnston will dispel some of the most common misconceptions about community management and reveal how to make it work.

With more than 80 crowdsourcing companies and 200 venture capitalists, researchers and professionals, the Crowdsortium is a group of industry practitioners that have self-organized to advance crowdsourcing models through best practices, education, data collection and public dialog. This is an event for members only. Find out more about how to become a member at http://www.crowdsortium.org/membership/.

The Crowdsortium Symposium will be held at Google HQ, 1900 Charleston Road, Mountain View, CA from Thursday, May 19^th to Friday, May 20^th. You can view the full agenda on the Crowdsortium website.

About uTest, Inc.
Founded in 2007, uTest is the world's largest marketplace for software testing services. The company provides real-world testing services through its community of nearly 40,000 professional testers from 175 countries around the world. Thousands of companies -- from startups to leading software, retail and media enterprises -- have signed up with uTest to get their web, desktop and mobile applications tested. More information can be found at http://www.utest.com or the software testing blog at http://blog.utest.com.