Crowd Source Capital purchases .com

"Crowd Source Capital Limited (UK) http://www.crowdsourcecapital.co.uk has purchased the USA domain http://www.crowdsourcecapital.com for an undisclosed sum and now has a footprint in the United States as well as Europe. Its directors believe in crowd sourcing as a 2010 trend and beyond. It can only trend upwards and as social media proliferates, crowd sourcing and crowd funding will be accepted in more and more traditional financial sectors says James de Rin a USA consultant for C.S.C. United Kingdom.

Pentagon to crowdsource Intel

Darpa’s New Plans: Crowdsource Intel, Edit DNA

The Pentagon’s mad science agency has big plans for next year: crowdsourcing military intelligence, creating an “immune system” for Defense Department networks, and even research that might one day lead to editing a soldier’s DNA.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, just released its budget for the upcoming year. And, as you might expect from the Pentagon’s way-out science and technology division, there are some wild new projects on tap.

Military analysts are already overwhelmed by too much information. Instead of training more analysts or handing data over to computers, Darpa wants to improve how the military uses its intelligence info by turning it into an open call for contribution. The $13 million dollar project, called “Deep ISR Processing by Crowds,” looks “to harness the unique cognitive and creative abilities of large numbers of people to enhance dramatically the knowledge derived from ISR systems.”

Crowdsourcing is already used among businesses and other government agencies, to generate more innovative ideas that draw on as many sources as possible. Darpa wants that innovation to take over individual analysis and decision-making:

Novel frameworks will be developed to capture the experience base of users and systems to allow problem partitioning, quantitative confidence assessment, and validation in environments that may be partially compromised by adversaries.

When it comes to cybersecurity, Darpa’s taking inspiration from nature, with “Cyber Immune” — a defense model for the Pentagon’s computing systems that’s able to detect an attack, fight back and even heal itself automatically to prevent subsequent infiltration.

The current model for cybersecurity, dubbed “perimeter defense,” uses firewalls that hackers try to break through. Once they make it inside, they’ve got free rein, and the compromised system is vulnerable to ongoing outside attacks until the firewall is rebuilt. Instead of technicians who patch holes as they find them, Darpa wants a system with the instincts to go it alone, and that “assume[s] security cannot be absolute, yet … can still defend itself in order to maintain its (possibly degraded) capabilities, and possibly even heal itself.”

Of course, Darpa’s also living up to its mad-science rep, with ambitious plans to fast-track mastery over the human genome. Darpa’s budgeted $7.5 million in hopes of “increas[ing] by several decades the speed with which we sequence, analyze and functionally edit cellular genomes.”

Editing DNA could have widespread implications, but Darpa seems most interested in two: microchip implants that restore senses and movement in traumatic injury patients, and the ongoing Darpa goal of boosting troop performance in the field:

On the other end of the size scale, a primary goal is to apply microsystem techniques to soldier-protective biomedical systems. One example is an in-canal hearing protection device that will provide enhanced hearing capabilities in some settings, but be able to instantly muffle loud sounds of weapons fire. This one example will improve inter-personnel communications and at the same time drastically reduce the incidence of hearing loss in combat situations. For these examples and many more, the goal is to bring exceptionally potent technical approaches to bear on biological and biomedical applications where their capabilities will be significant force multipliers for the DoD.


Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/darpas-new-plans-crowdsource-intel-immunize-nets-edit-dna/#ixzz0eZnrOI2v


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Super Bowl Shuffle: Why Marketers Will Shift to 'Platforms

Brands That Continually Throw to Consumers Will Win Come Monday Morning and Beyond
The teams playing in this year's Super Bowl have already been decided, but the Super Bowl shuffle for advertisers began in earnest last month when marketing mainstays like FedEx, General Motors and Pepsi made news by announcing they were opting out of this year's ad extravaganza.

But for those looking to gauge the health of the ad industry, Super Bowl advertising is a bit of red herring. CBS is charging about $2.5 million for 30 seconds of commercial time -- and rightly so. Rarely do you get so many Americans watching one event and actually enjoying the advertising. It's a tremendous opportunity for most brand marketers and we'd be foolish to look at this year's Super Bowl as proof of either the rejuvenation of the 30-second spot or the rejection of it.

That doesn't mean some won't try. After all, last year Hulu saw a 50% increase in site traffic after running ads during the Super Bowl and Denny's traffic to its website soared nearly 1,700% as consumers sought information about its free breakfast promotion.

There certainly will be advertising winners (and losers) on Super Bowl Sunday but let's hope that the Monday morning quarterback chatter doesn't obscure the larger shift at hand for marketers this year. 2010 will be the year of the "platform" for advertisers.

Unlike a website, banner, Facebook application or 30-second spot, a platform is an always-on digital environment that allows brands to run specific or multiple programs. The goal is to meaningfully engage consumers on multiple levels. For some brands, that means creating an immersive experience with integrated commerce. For others, it means enabling consumers to connect with each other in valuable, unexpected ways.

But for marketers, the real winners this year will be the brands who have built these platforms to engage consumers well after this year's Super Bowl becomes a distant memory -- there are another 364 days to worry about after all. Here's a look at some of the more interesting platforms in play today:

Pepsi's Refresh Everything Community Action Platforms: Perhaps the biggest, and most noteworthy, push into this space comes from PepsiCo, which opted to sit out the Super Bowl to tout it's cause-marketing program Refresh Everything. The platform, which is inspired by crowdsourced ventures like Kickstarter, enables Pepsi to award grant money to consumers who suggest various ideas and iniatives for their communities. The effort is akin to other cause-marketing efforts like Procter & Gamble's Tide: Loads of Hope, where consumers purchase T-shirts, among other things, to fund Tide's effort to help families stricken by disaster with basic laundry services.

Crowdsourcing Platforms: While not exactly new, enough brands are finding success using crowdsourcing platforms to generate insight and drive deeper consumer participation that we will surely see more this year. Starbuck's MyStarbucksIdea.com is clearly the outsized success here with tens of thousands of ideas collected and a vibrant community. Dell's Idea Storm falls into this category, as does Lego's Mindstorm. The most recent entrant is Best Buy's Ideax, which shares similar elements of the category but goes somewhat further by allowing users to search/browse by ideas generated "Nearby." The community here is both virtual and local.
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Video Game Tries Tiered Crowdfunding Model

These days, doing "crowdfunding" of music has become so commonplace that it's hardly worth mentioning any more, but it's still a bit new in other content realms. Reader Pat points us to the news that a new video game, Grim Dawn, is trying to fund itself with this kind of model. The game is a "spiritual successor" to Titan Quest, and has three tiers of support from $20 to $48. Basically, the more you pay, the earlier access you get to the game (alpha or beta stage). I'd be curious to see how well it works, but I'm not sure it really offers that much excitement. I could see big fans of the game really wanting to get in on the alpha, but I wonder if it's enough to really fund the game.
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Crowd Source Capital Enters Top ten crowdsourcing twitters on http://wefollow.com/twitter/crowdsourcing

Crowd Source Capital enters the top ten crowdsourcing twitters for the first time with 1269 followers.

#1 Jeff Howe Crowdsourcing Jeff Howe is a writer at Wired Magazine and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard U...4,468 followers

#2 dexin Interested in Entrepreneurship, Crowdsourcing, Cloud Computing and Macro...19,597 followers

#3 Jason Spector A crowdsourcing and creative consultant standing at the crossroads of us...1,840 followers

#4 BBH Labs Marketing Skunkworks: new models for marketing, new models for creative...11,866 followers

#5 john winsor On the Victors & Spoils team 4,335 followers


#6 GeniusRocket We are an Ad Agency powered by the creative crowd. Offering both a mark...9,849 followers

#7 Crowdfunding Captures the crowd & brings them together to form a common goal of fund...2,143 followers

#8 Jennifer Moebius PR Maven @ uTest, Crowdsourcing Co. & World's Largest Software Testing M...610 followers

#9 Jason Rickard PCToolsTogether is an initiative to enable the community to translate...21,979 followers

#10 Crowd Source Capital crowdsourcecap Crowd Source Capital - Sources ideas and capital with the support of onl...1,269 followers
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Crowdsourcing Chaordix(TM) partners with IBM

Chaordix joins Council to help shape the information governance framework that will equip enterprises to lead in the future. Chaordix(TM), a leader in delivering technology and know-how to help enterprises adopt crowdsourcing for business advantage, today announced it has joined the Information Governance Council. The group was formed by IBM in 2005 along with dozens of leading corporations, institutions and technology solution providers in a global effort to develop a "blueprint" of common solutions for challenges that apply to security, privacy, trust and corporate compliance issues.

Information Governance is the process by which companies govern appropriate access to their critical data by measuring operational risk and controlling security exposures. The Information Governance Council is working to redefine the management of information governance policy, the impact of policy on business processes and practices, and the enforcement of policy in IT infrastructure, information management and organizational behavior. Members of the Council are collaborating on ways to address these issues using solutions and business concepts from IBM and its business partners.

"The goal of the Information Governance Council is to address one of the biggest issues for businesses today - managing and controlling the mountains of data that reside within companies," said Steven Adler, chair of the Information Governance Council and program director, IBM data governance solutions. "Chaordix is a welcome addition to the Council as their perspective on the impact of social technology and open innovation sheds light on how democratizing data is proving valuable to enterprises."
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Mobile OS maker is using crowdsourced ideas to improve the wireless industry--and its own image.

Virtually everyone has ideas on how cellphones, mobile applications and the wireless industry could be improved. But, as in many industries, these opinions aren't always heard or heeded by the companies that make these devices and services.

In October 2009, the Symbian Foundation, a nonprofit organization behind the world's most popular mobile operating system, set out to bridge this gap with an idea-generation Web site called Symbian Ideas. Utilizing a system that borrows features from Wikipedia, news aggregator digg.com and a Procter & Gamble ( PG - news - people ) site that solicits product ideas from consumers, the site has collected more than 800 ideas from hundreds of people. So far, the foundation, which counts AT&T ( T - news - people ), Nokia ( NOK - news - people ) and Sony ( SNE - news - people )Ericsson ( ERIC - news - people ) among its nearly 200 members, has adopted about 5%, or 40 of the suggestions.
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Can You Crowdsource Journalism? Seed is Trying

In what he hopes will be the first big demonstration of the “crowdsourcing” potential of AOL’s new Seed.com service, former New York Times writer Saul Hansell says he is looking for writers who will write up interviews with all of 2,000 or so bands and artists at the SXSW music festival in Austin. The assignment will involve “real reporting,” Hansell said in an interview, in which writers will have to pick up the phone and call the band or artist and write up a 1,000-word interview in question-and-answer format, as well as a 300- to 500-word biography. The price for this assignment? The princely sum of $50.

Both Seed and similar web-based contract-writing services from Demand Media and Associated Content have come under fire from a number of critics who say they are primarily designed to generate low-quality, cheap content that contains just enough keywords to attract search-engine traffic, and therefore advertising. Hansell, however, who joined AOL in December as head of programming at Seed, says that what he is trying to do is to figure out how to “deploy human intelligence at scale,” and that it is much more than just an effort to generate “the lowest-common denominator of SEO-friendly pages.”
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Crowdsourcing is Broken: How to Fix It

New business models, "mini crowds", and self-respect could mean online communities thrive so client and creative talent benefit alike.The opportunity to tap the power of the crowd has spawned a whole regime of companies that promise to break down barriers and unlock the potential of the masses. But beneath this recent trend lie major fundamental flaws.
Don't get me wrong. This is not another whining diatribe against the perils of crowdsourcing. But without new business models and core principles that leverage these forces in a way that empowers its participants, the opportunity is likely to implode. Those involved need to innovate and start harnessing the crowd in more mutually beneficial (and thus sustainable) ways.
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How To Crowdsource from the Cloud

Crowdsourcing is the outsourcing of work to a large community of people. The size and quality of Wikipedia and open source projects like Linux and Wordpress are a testament to what crowdsourcing can accomplish.

But what if you do not have a community ready to show up for work? Luckily there are Web services like Mechanical Turk and LiveWorks that can help broker tasks with people who will do them for money.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk allows you to integrate a human being into your application or business process to do work that computer programs traditionally find difficult. Amazon describes work units as:

A Human Intelligence Task, or HIT. A question that needs an answer. A HIT represents a single, self-contained task that a worker can work on, submit an answer, and collect a reward for completing.

For example, if you need to check that user uploaded photographs are not offensive, you can integrate your application with the Mechanical Turk API to submit a HIT for each piece of content that is uploaded. The HIT would require a worker to decide whether the photograph was offensive or not. Each worker who performs a HIT by submitting their judgment call would earn a fee. You decide the fee a worker will earn each time a HIT is done. If you set the fee too low, then you will find it difficult to attract workers to do your task.

Once a Mechanical Turk Worker (a Turker) submits a HIT, the requester can approve or reject the result. These results contribute to the worker's reputation. Mechanical Turk supports restricting the pool of workers who are eligible to work on HITS using worker attributes such as their language skills or their geographic region.

In contrast, LiveWork takes a different approach to getting work done. LiveWork is more suitable to organizations that are looking for a longer lasting relationship with workers, or where the work is more complex than answering a question. LiveWork provides a list of workforces you can hire. Workforces may be an individual or a team who offer different services and rates - often negotiable. Work is not submitted via an API, but rather described via a Project mechanism similar to freelancing sites like eLance and Rent-a-Coder. Once projects are underway, bulk tasks can be created via an upload mechanism. For example you may upload a CSV file containing many sales calls for a workforce make.

The LiveWork site also maintains workforce reputations via ratings, but also via written reviews - a clear indication that tasks require more engagement between client and worker.

The two services provide very different approaches to outsourcing work. LiveWork focuses on building a flexible extension to your business whereas Mechanical Turk facilitates very brief encounters with no enduring client and worker relationship.
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China says no to crowdsourcing one internet USA foreign policy.

The emerging Chinese view (which has been longer established as the Castro government's view of the Internet in Cuba) is that while Internet protocol is a useful technological invention, the actual content on the Internet tends to be too heavily American and often incompatible with the type of society it seeks to create. China isn't prepared to crowdsource to the world the information its citizens take in. On that point, the Washington Post's Steven Mufson cites the pro-government Global Times as saying that "countries disadvantaged by the unequal and undemocratic information flow have to protect their national interest, and take steps toward this." (The Global Times also uses the term "the Google farce" as a descriptor in its reported pieces.) A Chinese blogger quoted by Mufson puts it more plainly, saying "The attitude of the U.S. is so arrogant. Clinton mentioned one Internet. Actually, it's the Internet of the United States."
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Waze has enlisted 500,000 users for its crowdsourced driving app

Waze, the company that offers driving directions based on crowdsourced data, is revealing some specific numbers to illustrate its progress. The company just shared its users numbers and also announced its first deal with a map provider.

The company first launched its mobile application in Israel, then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond last year. (It’s based in Israel and Palo Alto.) Now it has 500,000 users, who contribute to Waze’s data by leaving the application open on their GPS-enabled phones as they drive, feeding map and traffic information back to the application. 5,000 users are more active, making edits to the various maps, and 550 users even more active than that, working as area managers who oversee the editing.

Waze now has maps in 85 countries, chief executive Noam Bardin said. 70 percent of the application’s traffic is coming from the United States, while 19 percent comes from Italy — the dominance of the US makes sense, but Bardin had a harder time explaining why Italy has taken off so strongly
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How to empower entrepreneurs through crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing has been a growing trend and its a wonderful way to find new volunteers. There are a variety of different types of crowd-sourcing that fit almost any need that a nonprofit might have. Recently, National Association of Federal Credit Union leveraged a crowd-sourcing group to help launch advertisements to promote its nonprofit branches across the US.
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Crowdsourcing talent for tourism.

Judging is now taking place on submitted entries for New Zealand's "Your Big Break"...Lord of The Rings Director Peter Jackson is currently judging talent for tourism. The subject of the film is: CAPTURING THE SPIRIT OF 100% PURE NEW ZEALAND - THE YOUNGEST COUNTRY ON EARTH.

You need to think of a script, an idea and a scenario that brings that statement to life. Remember, you need to be able to produce your idea on a reasonably limited budget and you need to be able to tell your story in exactly three minutes.The location for your filming is New Zealand. Specifically, the spectacular Queenstown area in the South Island. New Zealand was the last country on earth that any human ever set foot on. Therefore it stayed pure and green and uninhabited longer than any other place on earth. You can explore this insight further and find out more facts and observations about the Youngest Country by exploring the contents and links on this site. There are obviously a number of ways you could capture the essence of this statement. For example, it could be about the young attitude of the country – what it’s like to be a teenage country amongst the continental grandparents. It could be about the land itself – a place that still has active volcanoes and powerful geothermal activity (although not in the Queenstown area). The area for shooting, Queenstown, is also known as the adventure capital of the world.

This is not about making a commercial for New Zealand - you can take any angle on this you wish. You might take it from a personal perspective of being there for perhaps the first time, you might see it through the eyes of a visitor, or a local or purely from the natural surroundings you discover. It might be funny, sad, evocative, exciting, shocking or simply beautiful.

Remember: Your film will first be judged on the power of the idea but it will also be judged on practicalities, which are detailed below. You will need to keep in mind your timing and resource constraints when creating the idea and this will play an important part in deciding which ideas make it through to production.
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The Opposite of Crowdsourcing: HelloMusic Launches

HelloMusic, a new online music venture that seeks greater awareness for undiscovered artists, announced it raised $4 million in funding from KVG Partners. The site, at hellomusic.com, launched on Friday.

The company was created by Wilshire Media Group, a digital music product design and development firm founded by Zack Zalon and Brendon Cassidy. Zalon and Cassidy were early employees of Farmclub.com, the short-lived online record label co-founded by Jimmy Iovine and Doug Morris. Later, Zalon was president and Cassidy the CTO of Virgin Digital.

Web sites and companies that act as springboards for unheralded artists are plentiful and, often, well funded. Zack Zalon, a managing partner at Wilshire, says the company differentiates itself because of the human element in the screening process. "We don't believe algorithms work," he said. "They don't. We don't think crowdsourcing works. It doesn't. I think you have to have a pair of ears and quality does matter."

In effect, HelloMusic acts as both a filter and a traffic manager, placing good music with partners such as Yahoo! Music and Getty Images.

Here's how it works: An unsigned artists (a limited number in the early stage) sign up and upload songs. Screeners, each well versed in specific genres, listen to every track, rate them and make note of opportunities with HelloMusic's partners. The company is limiting the number of invites in stage one. More users will be allowed to use the service when stage two commences in a few months.

A number of partnerships are in place on the launch date. Qualifying tracks have the option of being licensed through AudioMicro and Getty Images. Top tracks will be added to programming at Web radio service Slacker and Yahoo! Music. Artists will also have access to the services of booking site GigMaven, lyric search engine LyricFind, marketing platform Topspin, digital distributor TuneCore (with a "significant discount"), tech platform MediaNet and music analytics firm Next Big Sound.
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Chase Crowdsources Non-Profit Donations to Facebook Users

Today is the last day of the second round of Chase Community Giveaway Campaign on Facebook. Chase Financial Services – a giant financial conglomerate, started a community giveaway campaign on Facebook in November last year. As part of the campaign, Chase would give away $5 million to charities. The voting ends today and soon enough the top charity, which will receive $1 million, will be announced.

Chase launched the campaign as a Facebook application which contained a list of 500,000 nonprofit organizations. The bank then crowd sourced the selection of the charities to Facebook users. In the first round, which ended on Dec 11, 2009, the top 100 charities (selected by users) won $25,000 each and advanced into the second round. The second round lasted this entire week and would determine which charity would get the top price of $1 million. The five runners-up in the second and last round will also each receive $100,000.

More than 1.7 million Facebook users participated in the first round to vote and vouch for their favorite non-profit organizations. These numbers, however have dropped to around 1.5 million users in the second round – but that might be due to the elimination of a large number of organizations in the first round.

The idea to crowd source philanthropic donations is not new and was first initiated by American Express in 2007. Back in those days, Digg and Reddit were the frontrunners in institutionalizing the concepts of crowd sourcing news discovery and editorial. American Express borrowed the crowd sourcing concepts from these social news sites and launched the Members Project – which donated $5 million to charities selected by AmEx card members.
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