Melanie Swan a futurist predicts crowdsourcing as the next...

Although written a year ago 2008, it is very timely as Facebook and Twine take off into the stratosphere, that new business models using social media and crowdsourcing will be implemented. If Facebook needs to know how to monetise 250,000,000 people I suggest they read Melanie Swan's presentation...
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Video: I Want One of Those website tested with crowdsourcing

Online retailer, I Want One of Those, has turned to crowdsourcing to cut the time it needs to test upgrades to its website.IWOOT says that the technique has helped it to cut testing time from days to hours, allowing it to update its site quickly without risking serious errors that could damage sales. The company is working with US-Israeli firm, uTest, which runs a community of 18,000 testers, who compete online to find bugs in return for cash prizes and kudos in the testing community.
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Another Inefficient Market Meets Crowdsourcing

I came across this...It seems that no matter how many times history plays out the hand dealt to inefficient markets, the next inefficient market to be assailed wails in protest. Jeff Howe’s article on Crowdsourcing in graphics and design, discusses the reaction from many designers to this discount approach to their core business. What I take from the group of designers who’ve formed the group called NO!SPEC, is that they would have resisted enabling stock trades to happen through anything but a paid broker, or that they are on the side of real estate agents in their fight with the discount agents and websites that perform similar services without the 6% fee.
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Crowdsourcing Sounds Useful – But How? Set to grow by $1 billlion...

Crowdsourcing - I can see how useful this is, but I’m having a hard time thinking of what I’d use it for exactly.” This is by far the most common reaction to an explanation of how easy and broadly accessible crowdsourcing (getting work done on-demand) is now through Smartsheet.I predict that paid, technology powered crowdsourcing will grow in excess of 100% per year for most of the next decade (over a Billion dollars in the next 5 years)...
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Skype Prime won't make global phone sex operators rich

When Skype released its "pay per minute" Prime service in 2007, it was billed as a way for experts (and phone sex operators) to sell their services to anyone, anywhere. Two years later, the service has withered on the vine. Services designed to crowdsource human expertise have struggled to gain traction. Amazon's Mechanical Turk has done well, but services like Google Answers folded years ago. Skype Prime appears to be on its way out, as well.
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Crowdsourcing slashes software testing time

Most people are familiar with crowdsourcing from reading the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which uses volunteers across the world to update its content. But US-Israeli firm uTest has pioneered crowdsourcing to help companies test their software. The technique is attracting growing number of converts, including Microsoft and Google.
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Portland businesses criticize city's bid for free Web redesign

Crowdsourcing is hot in the business world, with companies asking the public to design T-shirts, shoes and more -- then vote the best entries into stores. Portland city officials joined the fray this month, launching a contest to help redesign the government's Web site. They see the project as a hip, tech-savvy way to engage a city known for civic pride. "Portland has a lot to live up to in terms of public input," says Roy Kaufmann, spokesman for Mayor Sam Adams. Not cool, Portland. By asking amateurs to design for free, creative professionals say, the city is disrespecting a signature industry and botching a chance to brand Portland.
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Crowdsourcing Closer Government Scrutiny

A new Web-based effort promises to track the sources of congressional earmarks, compile databases of the Twitter posts of state lawmakers, and add sharper perspective to the Obama administration's open-government efforts. Government watchdogs: With an online tool developed by Sunlight Labs, Web-based volunteers can comb through earmark requests. "Government puts out a ton of data that is really interesting about what it does, but people can't understand it," says Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs, an arm of the open-government group Sunlight Foundation, based in Washington, DC.
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'Crowdsourcing' offers quick buck...

With the economy reeling and California's unemployment rate moving toward 12 percent, many people are looking at all options for earning an extra buck or two. Amazon Mechanical Turk -- an online site based on the evolving concept of "crowdsourcing" -- is emerging as a way Web site visitors can make a few dollars, without the hassle of launching a formal search for a job or freelance work. "I'm saving up for some Christmas presents for my wife," said Rob Allshouse of Sacramento, a casual user of the Web site run by Amazon Web Services, the online retailer's foray into computer technology.
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When Group Think is Good...

I came across this...An interview with Dwayne Spradlin President and CEO, InnoCentive, Inc.
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What if Readers Fund an Open Journalism?

From a blog by payyattention.com In a previous post I considered certain skeptical objections to micropatronage as a funding model for journalism, objections based on the impression that such a system would not see widespread use. But in a recent meeting with executives at a major US daily, I saw another kind of reaction, based on the apprehension that a per-article system of micropatronage might prove popular. These executives caught a glimpse of a new funding stream -- something they badly need. But they also glimpsed a host of uncertainties and risks concerning the paper's proper role in its community. They saw that micropatronage and crowdfunding systems raise the prospect of a shift in the core standards of journalism. Such systems raise traditional concerns about undue influence exercised by sources of funding, along with traditional concerns about an unhealthy reliance on popular judgment. But the combination of these perennial concerns in today's media context yields new perspectives on old themes. The risks and uncertainties that result are a necessary part of an experimental attitude toward the future of journalism.
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payattention.com readers can now crowdfund journalists...

payattention.com may have discovered the paradigm shift of new business models. On the one hand a 10 cents donation for reading an article you like, paid directly to the writer could create an upswing in the value of newspaper groups, just as the final nail in the coffin of newsprint was predicted by many...
Its by invitation only...but it looks like a winner to us. This could save the newspaper industry. Rupert Murdoch should call these guys and say how much do you need? I'll give you venture capital...Just when you thought newspapers were dead in the water some genius reinvents the business model and overnight journalists will be funded by readers of articles who love their content. Hats off to you guys for inventing this crowdfunded business model. Quite brilliant. I repeat quite brilliant. This year crowd sourcing and crowd funding are reinventing the web, one crowd at a time...it has been a great week to be in this business, it is going to explode with new business models...amazing stuff...
payattention.com

As Prosper Gets The Green Light, A Comeback For Peer-to-Peer Lenders?

As banks clamp down on consumers’ ability to get credit, alternative credit sources could be getting a boost. On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission gave its blessing for Prosper.com–one of the largest players in the peer-to-peer lending space–to register its loans as securities, allowing the company to reopen its doors nationally after it entered a quiet period last October. The completion of the SEC registration process “means loans that are now purchased on Prosper are technically registered securities which means they can be resold in the secondary market,” said Chris Larsen, chief executive and co-founder of Prosper. As part of the registration process, the SEC approved Prosper’s auction-based platform, which works like an eBay-style marketplace for would-be borrowers and lenders. It’s the first time that regulators have approved a pricing mechanism where the final price of a security isn’t secured in advance. By contrast, other peer-to-peer players offer lenders a range of fixed rates.
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change.org crowdsourcing change...

I came across this...Our Vision. Today as citizens of the world, we face a daunting array of social and environmental problems ranging from health care and education to global warming and economic inequality. For each of these issues, whether local or global in scope, there are millions of people who care passionately about working for change but lack the information and opportunities necessary to translate their interest into effective action. Change.org aims to address this need by serving as the central platform informing and empowering movements for social change around the most important issues of our time. History...Change.org is a social entrepreneurship venture based in San Francisco, CA. The company was founded by Ben Rattray in the summer of 2005, and with the support of a friend from Stanford, Mark Dimas, and a founding team of Darren Haas, Rajiv Gupta, and Adam Cheyer, Change.org launched the first version of its site in 2007.
change.org

IBM crowdsources the Smarter Planet University Jam...

Eight of 10 students want universities to revamp traditional learning environments while over 90 percent want to join or start a green advocacy group on their campus. 64 percent of students believe that the world has a chance to reverse carbon emissions by 2025, and 60 percent believe that education and efficient transportation offer the best hope for sustainability of our cities. These are just a few of the findings of a remarkable crowdsourcing process held by IBM called the Smarter Planet University Jam. Nearly 2,000 students and faculty from more than 200 universities from 40 countries took part in the Jam along with top IBM experts, clients and business partners. Students around the world showed that they are eagerly seeking opportunities to work together with industry to create a Smarter Planet, and they are extremely optimistic about the future.
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IBM.com

thepoint.com

I came across this...Easy and Effective Group Action. Whether you're raising money, organizing people, or trying to influence change: if you can't do it alone, you can do it on The Point. As a consumer, employee, citizen, activist, parent, or whatever, sometimes you can’t do things alone - you need the power of many. The Point offers a new approach to leveraging the influence of groups and making things happen.
thepoint.com

CEO Interviews: Andrew Mason CEO Groupon.com

An interview with Andrew Mason CEO of Groupon.com a real crowdsourcing company success...
Click To View on Groupon: Community Cash

Financing model with bounce...

Jumping into a funding model for the online age, by Emma Jacobs FT. Earlier this year, Trampoline Systems, a London-based technology company founded in 2003, realised if they were going to further expand the business, they would need some more money. So they sounded out a few venture capitalists. But, says Charles Armstrong, one of the company’s founders “it soon became clear that it would be tough to raise finance this way”. So Trampoline hit upon another route: “crowdfunding” – raising small stakes from a large group of investors, particularly through online communities and social networks. The crowdfunding concept derives from “crowdsourcing”, whereby organisations ask the public, usually via the internet, to do jobs typically done by their employees. For example, The Guardian newspaper’s website recently asked readers to trawl through 700,000 expense claims by British MPs to unearth foibles and misdemeanours. Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding could, in theory, occur without the internet, says Jeff Howe, the man who coined the term “crowdsourcing” and wrote a book on the subject, but “it certainly helps to accelerate the process”. Trampoline was encouraged by the crowdfunding successes of the likes of SellaBand, a site which connects music fans with unsigned artists looking to record albums. Musicians post their profiles and songs, and ask the site’s users to buy shares, at a minimum of $10. As soon as an artist sells 5,000 shares, they can record the album and the proceeds are then split between the artist, SellaBand and the artist’s supporters, or “believers”, as the site dubs them. Trampoline’s effort is unusual, however, because the company is already established – it employs 15 and raised £2m in seed capital from venture capitalists when it launched. But, says Mr Armstrong, with traditional venture capital funds battening down the hatches in the current downturn, it seemed like the best option. Deloitte’s Global Trends in Venture Capital 2009 report notes: “The classic Series B round where a business is still finding its legs...carries more risk given higher burn rates and the climate’s uncertainty around future financings. So, we’re seeing reduced investment levels as firms either invest smaller sums in very early-stage companies or invest traditional sums in fewer and much later-stage companies. The middle ground has been largely vacated.” Trampoline hopes crowdfunding will circumvent these obstacles and create new opportunities. “A typical venture capital funding would be half a dozen investors. I suspect there’ll be about 60 or 70 investors,” says Mr Armstrong. “The benefits of such a large investor network is that it will bring in new contacts and experience and will build a stronger support ecosystem.” The company is considering ways to harness the “collective intelligence” of its investor group. This might include an idea rating system, virtual working groups, voting systems and monthly “investor meet-ups”. But this system poses its own challenges. “I would be wary about conflicting agendas of many investors and it might be difficult to manage their expectations if the company doesn’t do as well as they hoped,” says Nathan Williams, a spokesman for the British Venture Capital Association. The investment stakes for Trampoline are much higher than SellaBand. It is asking investors to stump up a minimum of £10,000 and they hope to raise £1m in total. They have not put a time limit on when they hope to achieve their target. Asking for such large sums requires greater regulation, and creating this new funding model has involved lengthy negotations with the UK’s Financial Services Authority and lawyers. However, if Trampoline believes they need only create a website, adhere to the regulatory requirements, sit back and wait for the money to roll in, they are wrong says, Dagmar Heijmans, one of the founders of SellaBand. He says crowdfunding relies on “networking, good contacts and a good product”. The people who succeed are the ones that communicate with their contacts and promote themselves. Some bands busk to drive people to their online profile. Andy Baio, chief technology officer of Kickstarter, an online platform which raises funds for creative projects through crowdfunding, agrees: “The success of projects hinges on two factors: first, rewards for supporters. It doesn’t need to be financial, it can be a phone call or a credit on a film, or an exclusive update on the project. Second, their ability to promote it to their social network.” He cites the success of Allison Weiss, a singer from Athens, Georgia. She was hoping to raise $2,000 in three months to record an EP – she hit the goal in eight hours. Mr Baio put this down to her wide network of supporters and connection to the audience. “She recorded a video, explaining what she wanted to do and what everyone received in return. It was very sincere, and people connected with it.” Mr Heijmans has observed a pattern in crowdfunding. “We find that once people have reached 75-80 per cent of their target then the momentum really picks up.” He adds that it is important to get some investors before going public. “As long as no one invests in you, no one will follow. We suggest people get family and friends to invest to start the process off.” Mr Armstrong acknowledges the importance of marketing the business to his personal networks. He is optimistic crowdfunding will provide a successful venture capital model for established businesses. “We want to encourage other entrepreneurs to be innovative in raising finance,” he says. “I don’t have a stake in selling the model – it’s a way of making a contribution to the small business community.” Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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catwalkgenius.com crowdsources new fashion talent

Catwalk Genius is an online fashion store and a crowd-funding site. Buy fashion direct from our designers. Learn about where your fashion comes from. Support the development of fashion by backing a designer. Find out how..
catwalkgenius.com

For slicethepie.com crowdsourcing starts at a pound

Slicethepie is a financing platform for the music industry that enables new and established Artists to raise money directly from Music Fans and Investors. On Slicethepie, Music Fans take on the A&R role, earning money reviewing tracks, spotting new talent and ensuring the best Artists get put forward for financing.Music Fans can then directly invest in the Artists in return for exclusive Artist access, a copy of the completed album, their name on the album sleeve and a decent share in the financial returns from album and single sales.Investors (non-US only) can trade in and out of their Artist Investments at any time on the world’s first Music Trading Exchange, also hosted on the site.
slicethepie.com

Crowd Funding: Customers as Investors

I came across this...There's a new business model in which the customers play an unaccustomed role -- as investors. It's called crowd funding. Customers invest sometimes as little as $1 in a product -- often an album by a new musician, or clothes or jewelry from an aspiring designer. The customers then help promote the product by posting messages on the Web. Their incentive: a cut of the profits in proportion to their investment. They share in the risks as well, but each person's risk is low because he or she is part of a crowd of investors. A similar concept exists in charitable giving, in which people pool contributions, usually via the Web, to support various works and initiatives. But now some online companies have shown that such an approach may be fruitful for businesses, too.
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Frenden, an illustrator has a big problem with crowdsourcer Cameesa...

I don’t know about you, but I’m having a hard enough time making a living from illustration in the current economy. The ever growing list of crowdsourcing, spec-generating sites like 99Designs has added another to its tally, Cameesa. This is a particularly hard pill to swallow. Cameesa’s crowd-funding philosophy was almost an ubuntu-esque, anti-spec treatise...
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CreativeCrowds.com from Amsterdam is hiring...

We simply have the belief that crowd sourcing, the cooperation between businesses and consumers, has many benefits. From this conviction, we've been around since 2007 with the community insight company. Consumers are now much more than just consumers. Consumers are becoming more and more forming together into online communities where they talk about their intense interests. These consumers are smart and creative and want to go into dialogue with companies...
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Crowdsourcing airport security wait times...

I'd like to announce some major changes to the Apps For America 2 entry FlyOnTime.us, as well as ask for your help in a "crowdsourcing" experiment I'm conducting. First the experiment...I originally wanted to incorporate the data from the TSA's airport security line wait time calculator into my website, but unfortunately they discontinued it for some reason: http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/waittime.shtm
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Build Your Brand with "Crowdsourcing"!

Does your company have a problem you need to solve? Do you wonder whether your latest idea to launch a new product or service is a good one? Maybe you should use “crowdsourcing” to get answers. And, in the process, you may be building your brand among potential customers! “Crowdsourcing” is a relatively new concept that companies are using to start a dialogue with existing and potential customers that often results in building sales and brand loyalty, just by asking a large group of people for help! Crowdsourcing uses group intelligence to solve problems, create products or, in general, provide input.
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Computers 101: what is crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is a relatively new way of doing both marketing and product selection and development by asking the "crowd," or people outside of the traditional company, for input on what to do to bring a new product to market. It is done via a medium like the internet, where two-way communication is easy.Companies that use crowdsourcing may benefit in several ways:
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Crowd Source Capital launches "Win Your Own Private Island..."

Crowd Source Capital launches today its very first competition as a group on Facebook and a website on blogger.com it encourages crowd sourcing a competition from start to finish...
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Purdue trustees approve $24 million Verizon Business Network Services project to include crowdsourcing...

Purdue University students and faculty can expect a creative jolt this fall from a massive computer network upgrade. This fall Sugato Chakravarty will experiment with "crowdsourcing" -- one of a few new experiments planned for the network -- in his popular, 400-student personal finance course.
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TCL Crowdsourcing Brings On-Demand Web and Application Testing to the UK

18,000-Strong uTest Community Now Available to Help UK Organisations Control Cost of Software Testing, Accelerate Time-to-Market and Improve Overall Quality. TCL Crowdsourcing today announces that uTest, the world’s largest marketplace for testing web sites as well as desktop, mobile and gaming applications is now available in UK. The on-demand, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution is already reshaping the quality assurance (QA) landscape in the USA for organisations such as Google, Thomson Reuters and Intuit, and is set to do the same in the UK. Tony Prosser, Director at TCL Crowdsourcing explains, “Unlike hiring additional in-house QA personnel or signing long-term outsourcing contracts, TCL Crowdsourcing enables real-world, massive software testing coverage. Bespoke virtual QA teams with appropriate skills are constructed by environment and demographics such as access device type, application rules, firewall settings, geographic location, language, age, sex etc and deliver real-time responsiveness.
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Social entrepreneur finds money-making power of crowdsourcing

Entrepreneur stumbles upon moneymaking business tactic. Almost by accident, Andrew Mason has figured out what others wish they could: how to make money from electronic content. Mason's Groupon marketing company has done this through "crowdsourcing," which uses the power of the masses on the Internet. Groupon sends out daily e-mails with a deal that offers a product or service at a discounted price. The business relies on the collective purchasing power of a group of interested consumers, hence the name Groupon. Participating merchants pay a commission, making Groupon profitable at a time when so much Internet content lacks an income stream.
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groupon.com

Newspapers only survival is crowdsourcing?

Charity is likely to be a contributor to the future of news. So will volunteer labour in the form of bloggers and crowdsourcing. But we still need a business model for news. News still needs to be profitable to survive. It's not a church.
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Crowdsourcing investment research: opportunities in OSINT

I came across this...For crowdsourcing to work, the participants in the system — those that are donating their time and effort — must be getting a greater return for their effort than they are putting in.
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Spike Lee & Mofilm.com seminar...

Spike Lee, the Emmy Award-winning and Academy-nominated film director, producer, writer and actor, has recently entered the user-generated content fray directing a short film comprising YouTube-style videos created by teenagers and adults using their mobile phones for Nokia. Spike came to Cannes Lions to share his own UGC experiences and preside over the results of the MOFILM user-generated content initiative.
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Galaxyzoo.org

I came across this...The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, no less). In order to understand how these galaxies — and our own — formed, we need your help to classify them according to their shapes — a task at which your brain is better than even the fastest computer.
galaxyzoo.org

Money of the Crowds: Crowdsourced Funding...

I came across this...In light of a mini-controversy set off this morning when the founder of a web startup apparently violated SEC laws when he sent out a Twitter message looking for investors, The Globe and Mail’s Matthew Ingram wonders why can’t we raise money from the crowd for startups?
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Is Crowdfunding the future of journalism?

I came across this...Crowdfunding, or getting many people to donate small amounts of cash to fund a project, startup, or service, is nothing new. Think public radio or television pledge drives. Think political campaigns. Think tip jar. Now, as the media landscape changes and traditional revenue sources are beginning to disappear, some forward-thinking journalists and entrepreneurs are starting to apply the crowdfunding concept to the news.
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Crowdsourced Advertising: How We Outperform Madison Avenue Daren C. Brabham / University of Utah

I came across this...Companies have begun to capitalize on this concept and on the assumption that millions of heads are better than one when it comes to producing advertisements...
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Five Reasons to Help Emily Richmond Sail Around the World

Last week we told you about the growing number of independent artists turning to Kickstarter to crowdsource funds for the recording of albums, the production of feature films and even the reunion of infamously discordant bands. It's not just traditional creative-types who've flooded the site looking to support their endeavors, though, and of all the offbeat projects up for backing (convert a short bus to hawk Thai food, fund a griddle guide) Emily Richmond's is definitely the most ambitious.
The 24-year old currently lives in Los Angeles, but if everything goes as planned, sometime this winter she'll be setting off on what's probably the first “community-driven” circumnavigation of the globe, a two-year trip she seems poised to make all by her badass self.
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Britain's Got Art...

I came across this...We've had musical reality TV shows looking for the next Maria and Nancy, and an international online dance contest launched by Sadler's Wells – and now Charles Saatchi is looking for the best of Britain's undiscovered art talent. The project, called Saatchi's Best of British, is inviting artists from any discipline to apply online, with three to five images of their work, before 29 March (artists must be over 18 and not already represented by a gallery).
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submityourart.com

Nowpublic.com

I came across this...NowPublic is a user-generated social news website. The company is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and was founded by Michael Tippett, Leonard Brody and Michael Meyers in 2005. In addition to content contributed by users, NowPublic has a content-sharing agreement with the Associated Press.Time magazine named NowPublic.com one of the Top 50 websites of 2007.[1] In 2009, the site was nominated for an Emmy in Advanced Technology.
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A new Internet gold rush called crowdsourcing

Only the future will answer that question. But meanwhile we can observe that crowdsourcing is a phenomenon that is gaining fast acceptance in the business community and beyond. It has the potential to affect business quite fundamentally and can usher in radical changes to business models and business processes everywhere.
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Anjali Ramachandran of Made by Many compiles list of 135 crowdsourcing examples...

I came across this...Anjali Ramachandran, a strategist at London-based digital agency Made by Many, has compiled a very useful list of 135 real-world examples of businesses leveraging crowd contributions online. From small projects like the collaborative advertising creation project FatMuffin to big company efforts like SAP's Ecosystem, this list is great for inspiration and context. The web is proving to be quite disruptive to all kinds of old approaches to doing business, but there's still a shortage of case studies when it comes to new paradigms like crowdsourcing.
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Your Guide to the Crowdsourced Workforce

I came across this...Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, is a model of labor that has been fully embraced on the Internet over the past couple of years. Crowdsourcing takes tasks traditionally done by a single person or small groups of people, and farms them out to a global workforce. The large-scale committee approach is powerful because it leans on the concept of the "wisdom of crowds" (to a certain extent) which says basically that the more input, the better the output. We've written about a number of companies that employ crowdsourcing to produce their product or service here on ReadWriteWeb, but in this post we'll specifically look at companies that allow you to leverage the crowd to get something done.
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myidea.co.in crowdsourcing Indian views for change

My Idea: an initiative to change Indian politics, indian Society, views on Indian economy, entertainment & sports. Do you have an idea that can change India ...
myidea.co.in

Yousuggest.us launches in India

YouSuggest.us leverages the social nature of the internet to help you capture best of ideas and establishes a free flowing connection between you and your people.
yousuggest.us

The Magic of Many - India jumps on with crowdsourcing...

The magic of many...Crowdsourcing — letting others do it. CHENNAI: “Those in Mumbai, slums @ Geeta Nagar destroyed in rains, help with rice/atta/tea/pulses/clothes.” Recently a variant of this message kept echoing online in Twitter, the short messaging service. These messages would be tagged with #mumbairains, and anyone who wanted updates on how the city was coping with the annual monsoons — be it traffic jams, college attendance or office woes — could log in. And perhaps, wade through the water to Geeta Nagar with some hot tea. These messages were not being posted by one person, an organised group, the authorities or an institution; they came from the crowd — spread all over the world, united by a desire to help. Crowdsourcing involves taking a task and letting others do it, says Gaurav Mishra, founder and CEO, 20:20 Web Tech, a social media research and analytics firm. The crowd voluntarily took on the task of monitoring the rains. Interest was a major driver.
A company may want to know how to put pictures on potato chips. There would be many people in the world who would know how to go about it. The company could ask for contributions from all of them and choose the best one for use, says Mr. Mishra, explaining how crowdsourcing worked. As these people are amateurs, the company would not need to pay as much, and the person, whose motivation is to make that advertisement rather than commercial ends, is also satisfied. So a person living in Italy could give an idea to a person in India — something made possible by the Internet. Innocentive ( www.innocentive.com) is a crowdsourcing site based on this idea. In India, crowdsourcing as businesses is just catching up. Lattice Purple, a Delhi-based firm, has created a platform ‘YouSuggest’ (http://yousuggest.us) for companies to crowdsource ideas from customers. “The best of the ideas could be implemented for the product,” says Arvind Nigam, one of the founders of Lattice Purple. The platform is available for use through a SaaS (software as a service) model. “This is a democratic platform for ideas,” says Mr. Nigam. If the company does not implement an idea, there could be risk of a backlash. But companies could moderate discussions. Other tweaks may be needed for crowdsourcing to work in India. Myidea ( www.myidea.co.in), started by a private cellular service provider as a platform to crowdsource ideas on Indian politics, integrated SMS. “We kept in touch with the crowd using email, SMS and Web, because we’re not as “on the net” as people in the U.S. are,” says Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm, a digital advertising firm that managed Myidea. Crowdsourcing could take on other forms. For instance, Amazon Mechanical Turk ( www.mturk.com) calls itself a ‘marketplace for work.’ If you need to translate 10 pages in English into Telugu, you could advertise on this site. This task will be broken down and parcelled out to many people and then aggregated to provide you the translation. The photo site iStockphoto ( www.istockphoto.com) and the T-shirt site Threadless ( www.threadless.com) are some popular examples of sites using crowdsourcing.
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What's the perfect beer for racial reconciliation at the Whitehouse?

President Obama said he invited Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley to the White House for a beer, presumably to have a laugh about this racial and/or class flare-up about wrongful arrest and hissyfittedness in Cambridge. The more important question than whether this will result in some racial breakthrough, for beer connoisseurs at least, is: What Kind of Beer Will They Drink?...Leave your beer suggestions in the comments, and let’s see if we can’t crowdsource a diplomatic coup.
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How NY1's The Call Pioneered Crowdsourcing the News

In 2004, NY1's news anchor John Schiumo got into an argument with his producer about Martha Stewart. He didn't think the Ms. Stewart's court trials deserved a high ranking on the channel's nightly newscast. "I was insisting that people didn't care and she was insisting that people did care," Mr. Schiumo explained. "So I kind of blurted out: 'I want to host a newscast where the viewers tell me what's news because nobody cares about this.'"I lost the argument, but I walked away with the idea," he said.
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King.com Predicts Crowdsourcing of Flash Games Will Rival Games Studios

In a presentation to Casual Connect (http://seattle.casualconnect.org/index.html), the annual conference of the casual games industry, King.com's VP of Games Acquisitions and Advertising Sales, Alex Norstrom, announced the results of the company's global quest to discover and promote games development talent directly from individual developers, alongside 3rd party studios and their in-house team. In the six months since King.com (http://www.king.com), the world's leading online skill games company, started scouring the world for developers who can create high-quality games that could be promoted via their distribution network, over 40 games have been created and released, which have been played over 100 million times on 7,000 websites. "When we launched our global talent scouting, we were confident that we would unearth some potential superstars of games development. However, the depth of talent and the success of the games we have jointly created are as good as anything coming out of the studio system," said King.com's Alex Norstrom. "This development and marketing ecosystem is fuelling significant growth for King.com and, as a result, we are stepping up our global efforts and increasing our investment in talent that is based in their bedroom, not in studios."
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Twitter all-star? Best Buy may want to hire you...

CHICAGO - After buzz built online about a new marketing job, Best Buy Co. Inc. is reworking the help-wanted listing that sought Twitter experience and put a number on it — 250 followers. After the initial description for the new position of senior manager of emerging media marketing was published four weeks ago, the world's largest consumer electronics chain watched as the blogosphere reacted, prompting scores of tweets, re-tweets and blog posts. The requirement for popularity on the Twitter social-networking Web site caused the most online discussion and ultimately prompted the chain to harness the technology it hoped its newest employee would use. Best Buy opened the crowd-sourcing gates and asked the public for input on just what kind of skills and talents applicants should have. A blog post by Best Buy's chief marketing officer announcing the effort generated some 3,400 hits and produced nearly 250 comments.
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Myspace To Crowdsource "Youth Creativity"

In its efforts to step up its offerings in social media domains, MySpace will have its platform redesigned to help young people harness and exhibit their creativity skills, according to sources. MySpace chief exec Owen Van Natta has laid a future roadmap for making the social networking platform a place to show creativity, and along the same line, Van Natta will produce a report intended to reposition the website as a “window for the youth to reflect all their creative talents” within the upcoming four weeks.
To Learn More Click Here

Crowd Source Capital launches "Win Your Own Private Island..."

Crowd Source Capital launches today its very first competition as a group on Facebook and a website on blogger.com it encourages crowd sourcing a competition from start to finish...
To Learn More Click Here

Current.com crowdsources commercials for sponsors...

I came across this...Make a commercial and earn $2,500 (and up to $60,000) if it gets picked by our sponsors. About Current TV (Sky 183 and Virgin 155) www.current.com Current TVCurrent TV, the World’s first peer to peer news and information network has become a U.S phenomenon. It launched in the UK and Ireland in March 2007 on the Sky and Virgin Media platforms. Current TV is the first television channel created by, for and with an 18-34 year-old audience and uniquely one third of the channel’s programming is supplied by the very audience who watches it. Current TV’s innovative VC² (Viewer Created Content) concept promotes viewer contributions and the network pays these VC² producers when their films are shown on the channel. Everything on the network is open to viewer participation. Current invented Viewer Created Ad Messages (VCAM) and regularly features promotional spots created by its viewers. The station was founded by Al Gore the former Vice President of the United States, and entrepreneur Joel Hyatt. Academy Award Winner Gore describes the channel as ‘TV for the internet generation’, with programming that ranges from the hottest trends in technology, fashion, music and celebrity, to pressing issues concerning politics, finance and the environment. To Learn More Click Here

Of Course Crowdsourcing Will Get Stale If You Think Of It As Just A Marketing Gimmick

I came across this...News.com's Tim Leberecht wonders if crowdsourcing has "jumped the shark," pointing out that everybody and his dog seems to have a crowdsourcing program in place, and wonders if consumers are getting tired of the gimmick. I think the problem here is the way the question is being framed. If a company views crowdsourcing as just a one-off opportunity to get some free labor out of its customers, then obviously customers are going to get tired of it. But that's the wrong way to look at it. What crowdsourcing is about, ultimately, is improving communications with your customers, and among the customers themselves. Asking your customers to become more involved in various aspects of your business -- offering product advice to one another, providing feedback on new products, or offering ideas about advertising strategies -- increases customer loyalty by demonstrating that your company is actually engaged with its customers and responsive to their concerns. If your "crowdsourcing program" is limited to the marketing department, you're throwing away much of the potential value of the concept. Building strong relationships with customers and fostering online discussion about your products is at least as valuable as any cheesy ads a "make your own ad" contest might produce. Advertising gimmicks "jump the shark," but strong relationships with customers never do.
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Has Canonical licensed away its business model?

By announcing that it has open-sourced its Launchpad project under the Affero GPL version 3, a year after rumors swirled that it would, has Canonical licensed away one of its best revenue opportunities? As RedMonk analyst James Governor suggests, "(It may be) possible to make money as a tools company, without owning the runtime, if you offer hosting for the apps. IDE (integrated development environment) + cloud = dollars." Open source may help to make Launchpad more widely used, which, in turn, better positions it to be a Canonical-sponsored on-ramp to the Canonical-monetized cloud. Not a bad idea. (Certainly better than the apperi-sponsored Ubuntu application store, as reported by The VAR Guy.) It does suggest, however, that Canonical may be placing a lot of eggs in the cloud basket, a basket that has yet to prove that it can deliver solid, consistent returns to software companies. It comes with its own baggage, as Jonathan Zittrain writes). Time will tell if the cloud can feed Canonical's employees. But Shuttleworth isn't the sort of person to do something just because all the "in" kids are open-sourcing these days. Licensing Launchpad under the AGPL version 3 is a calculated move. We just don't know what the calculus will yield quite yet. To Learn More Click Here

Crowdsourcing: Female-Friendly Seating At The Linc

We got an e-mail from reader Matt that posed some questions about optimizing seating choices for an upcoming Eagles game. As I only have half-baked answers to his questions, I thought our always reliable commenters might be able to help...Don't sweat the upper levels, at all. The fights thing (especially for a preseason game) should not be an issue... To Learn More Click Here

techdirt.com practices what it preaches...crowdsourcing a sustainable business model?

If you’ve been reading Techdirt for a while, you already know what CwF+RtB means. Simply put, it’s our formula for a sustainable business model for the music industry (or any business with an infinite good, for that matter): Connect with Fans (CwF) and give them a Reason to Buy (RtB). CwF+RtB=$$$ So, we figure we should try it ourselves... and learn about the practice of it. If we’ve connected with you, then check out the packages below and hopefully one of them gives you a reason to buy. Then, by buying, you’ll be helping us prove that this model works. Thanks!... To Learn More Click Here techdirt.com

Oink oink! Crowdsourcing government earmark requests

A new project hopes to use volunteer labor to compile a list of all Congressionally requested "earmarks" into a central database. Get ready to slice, dice, sort, and map earmark requests online. "People are desperate for fruitcake these days," says The Cato Institute's Jim Harper when explaining why he's giving one away as a prize in his crowdsourced earmark-exposure contest. Behind the fruitcake lies a serious purpose: crowdsource the compilation of all federal legislators' "earmark" requests, those specific funding requests to dole out money directly to (hopefully) deserving entities in the legislator's home district. To Learn More Click Here Oink Oink

Crowdsourcing helps Best Buy rewrite job description

The Associated Press checks in with Best Buy today on its effort to crowdsource a job description for an emerging media marketing position. The retailer's request for help writing the job description generated thousands of hits and hundreds of comments. Only 18 people sent suggestions via an online suggestion box. Among the suggestions: Ask applicants to explain their qualifications in a tweet-length 140 characters or less.
The rewritten job description is expected to be posted on Best Buy's career website in several weeks, a spokeswoman tells the AP. To Learn More Click Here

mturk.com or Amazon Mechanical Turk's crowdsourced marketplace...

The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is one of the suite of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. Requesters, the human beings that write these programs, are able to pose tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk's Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the more limited Mturk Requester site. Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill Qualifications before engaging a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the Qualification. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which reflects on the Worker's reputation. Currently, a Requester has to have a U.S. address, but Workers can be anywhere in the world. Payments for completing tasks can be redeemed on Amazon.com via gift certificate or be later transferred to a Worker's U.S. bank account. Requesters, which are typically corporations, pay 10 percent over the price of successfully completed HITs (or more for extremely cheap HITs) to Amazon. To Learn More Click Here mturk.com

Journalism.co.uk crowdsources its new press release service...

Journalism.co.uk has its own service, PressGo, for matching press releases with journalists interested in 37 subject areas, from consumer goods and affairs to fashion, IT or the environment. But to make this service more efficient for its users (that’s you hopefully), we want feedback on how to write the perfect press release
To Learn More Click Here

Katarina Skoberne crowdsources global creative talent

At the picnic conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Katarina Skoberne presented her idea of open sourced creativity which she realizes through her startup openad.net. An online marketplace for buying and selling advertising, marketing and design ideas worldwide.OpenAd.net is the world's first online marketplace for buying and selling advertising, marketing and design ideas. We have over 11,500 Creatives in 125 countries offering their work to a growing number of international clients. Majority-owned by the founding partners, we began marketing the company to clients worldwide in 2007 after a successful trial period. We now have nearly 40 staff working for us in eight countries. Clients who have already used us include MTV, LastMinute.com, Chiquita, Emap (Bliss, FHM and Max Power), AC Intercar (local distributor for Mercedes and Smart), the Make Poverty History Campaign.Katarina Skoberne Interview
openad.net

Donanza.com finds you a crowd sourced project...

DoNanza is a new kind of search engine; a search engine for freelance online projects -the kind of money making and exposure getting tasks that you can do from home. Did you know there are hundreds of thousands of online projects across the Web?
They require all types of skills and fields of interest (from programming to music, from graphic design to copywriting)They offer rewards to those who perform them successfully (from cash to serious professional exposure)And they are all waiting for you! Here on DoNanza we collect all those online projects, and our mission (yes, we choose to accept it) is to expose them all and help YOU find the most relevant online projects. Each day, we scan the web hunting for new online projects and display them in one single format so you can easily search through hundreds of thousands of projects from countless sites. Within each project, you can see: The compensation offered, the time remaining for completion, whether it´s in bid, contest or other formats and whether in addition to enjoy performing the project it will also buy you your next Bahamas vacation… All you need to do is to state your skill or field of interest (you could be general and write "design" or be more specific to your skill set and write "Website design"), press the "Search" button, and we will show you all the World Wide Web has to offer. To Learn More Click Here donanza.com

Take the leap from Broadcasting to Crowdcasting

Listener Driven Radio is built on the concept of CROWDSOURCING—the process of creating by tapping into the wisdom of the crowd. When the audience co-creates programming with you, they have a sense of ownership and loyalty.LDR is a new model for radio, shifting stations from "broadcasts to crowdcasts."℠ Listeners vote, and your programming is affected in real-time. With LDR, radio stations can reach listeners through their station website, mobile (SMS and iPhone), and viral-widget. Listeners can embed your widget onto their sites the same way they embed a YouTube video. Then, LDR engages listeners, constantly absorbing their input, votes, and comments about your station’s music. This creates a community around your radio station’s brand.Finally, LDR adapts your radio station’s programming based on listener feedback and parameters preset by the Program Director. LDR ties in directly to your radio station automation system, feeding real-time commands into your station automation system based on the latest crowd-inputTo Learn More Click Here

2,088 peope were paid 6 cents each to add their voice to a song...

Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon's Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard. To Learn More Click Here

myfreeimplants.com crowdsources money for boob jobs

I came across this...Outrage over 'sponsor a boob job' website.The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS)has administered a righteous shoeing to a website offering girls the chance to pitch for a boob job and chaps the opportunity of sponsoring the enhancements. The offending site, myfreeimplants.com, asks the ladies: "Have you ever wanted bigger breasts? But couldn't afford the expensive costs of surgery? Here is your opportunity to earn Free Breast Implants!" Gentlemen, meanwhile, are enticed with: "Help the girl of YOUR dreams, get the body of her dreams. Develop a connection with a girl of your choice and help her earn Free Breast Implants!" Well, BAAPS has slammed the whole exercise as "degrading" and has warned British women "that the process was entirely inappropriate for what should be a life-changing decision".To Learn More Click Here myfreeimplants.com

Can Waze.com crowdsource traffic jams away?

Very few things can trigger road rage faster than being told by your GPS device to exit the highway on an off-ramp barricaded by construction pylons or to turn left onto a nonexistent service road. So goes the reality of location-based services, with so-called intelligent maps that ostensibly enable GPS to chart an unimpeded path between you and your destination. It's an industry that sprints from hype to hype, says Dominique Bonte, an analyst at ABI Research. Until now, no one has created dynamic "live" maps and real-time traffic on the back of a sustainable business plan. Is Israeli startup Waze the company that's going to reshape the industry? Created in 2008 by software engineer Ehud Shabtai, Waze uses GPS-enabled smartphones to distribute its free software, which maps out streets as you drive them and predicts traffic in real-time through crowd-sourced intel from commuters. No one else is doing all that at once and for free. Why now? The industry is at a turning point. The iPhone 3G S and Android platforms now support location, and smartphones finally have GPS chips good enough to compete with personal navigation devices that offer turn-by-turn directions. To Learn More click Here waze.com

Crowd-sourcing site launches NSW Government logo

A crowd-sourcing website has organised a competition to find a new logo for the NSW Government, after Premier Nathan Rees spent thousands of dollars designing a "botched" version, the website said. DesignBay.com, a marketplace operated by a 25 year old entrepreneur in Sydney, has launched a $1,000 contest to redesign the logo. The NSW logo, which was designed after 18 months of research, was meant to resemble the state's floral emblem, the Waratah, but botanists and gardening experts have said the logo is the spitting image of a lotus. DesignBay will give $1,000 to the best designer of a new logo. The contest will run for 30 days, and has already received 10 entries.
To Learn More click Here designbay.com

How to crowdsource a villain...

I’ve been doing the rounds on the RPG blogs again recently looking for ideas and content for an upcoming game. I found the usual sites full of ideas but I came across a new site that looks like it could be on to something. logoNevermet Press have took the idea of blog carnivals and collaborations between multiple sites to the next level. You hear about it everywhere these days but crowd sourcing seems to be working for these guys. To Learn More Click Here nevermetpress.com

Poptent.net

I came across this...Poptent, a startup that crowdsources advertising to the public... The site allows advertisers and brands to post requests for an ad, which are then produced and submitted by the pool of small studios and videographers that make up the site’s members. Poptent is a sister site to XLNTads, which focuses more on the brand marketers rather than video creators.Poptent CEO Neil Perry says that while Poptent is designed to encourage submissions from its thousands of members, it isn’t going for the “YouTube crowd”. Instead, it’s focused on catering to small but professional teams capable of producing TV-quality ads. To participate on the site, advertisers pay Poptent a fee of around $25,000, and then post guidelines as to what they’re looking for, along with assets like company logos. Poptent members then film and submit their ads to the site. If an advertiser finds an ad they like, they can purchase it for around $5-7,500 (oftentimes they will purchase multiple ads at once).While the process can run upwards of $30,000 for an advertiser, this only represents a fraction of what a typical TV-quality ad costs (which Perry estimates to be over $300,000). Because of these cost savings, advertisers are opened up to purchase multiple ads and can target them more effectively than one, costly ad that has to appeal to everyone.My main concern is that as the site gains in popularity (with more hopeful ad creators), the odds of having your ad purchased will decrease. Because these small production teams are paid nothing in advance and have no guarantees, this makes creating an ad more risky. Perry says that Poptent will try to offset these issues by identifying the best filmmakers and offering them seed money, and introducing them to other advertisers who might be interested in their work.Here’s a sample ad from one of the participating small teams: Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applicatio...To Learn More Click Here

Crowdsourcing victims of the Iran Elections...

The UK's Guardian newspaper is looking for assistance from the public in identifying victims of the arrests and violence in response to protests about the elections. I hadn't seen anything on DK about this yet, and this seems like a useful way to contribute. There are so many forgotten and unnamed heroes and heroines in the various and ongoing struggles for personal freedom and genuine democracy. To Learn More Click Here

Can you crowdsource a business? Eric Pratum asks the question...

I said that no one will make a ton of money, but if it really is possible to generate a viable business, what’s stopping it from being the next blockbuster business? Click To View

Who’s walking and talking crowdsourcing?

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO says Peer production is about more than sitting down and having a nice conversation... It's about harnessing a new mode of production to take innovation and wealth creation to new levels...MIT professor Eric von Hippel, specialist in innovation management says This is really the biggest paradigm shift in innovation since the Industrial Revolution."To Learn More Click Here

Viralsourcing: Let Crowds Create Your Ad Message

Not only are fans spreading the word about products—they're now helping to design and build marketing campaigns from the get-go. Ross Kimbarovsky, the co-founder of online design studio CrowdSpring.com, faced a dilemma last December. CrowdSpring, which matches designers with companies that need Web site graphics or logos, was less than a year into existence and needed to promote itself on a limited startup budget. Kimbarovsky took a page from his own social Web playbook. He asked a group on one of CrowdSpring's online forums for marketing ideas; one user suggested designers contribute a Web site to a nonprofit group free of charge. The group picked a charity that helps fathers of children with autism. To Learn More Click Here

A Video Discussion About Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation With Dwayne Spradlin

The President and CEO of InnoCentive, Inc. talks about opportunities a global workforce provides during the economic downturn Click To View

CMO of Kodak crowdsources a new word a twanker

"What should we call those people on Twitter that behave with rude and poor manners or operate with bad form?" The resounding response from the crowd was, drum roll please, "twanker.To Learn More Click Here

The Crowd Is Wise (When It’s Focused)

FEW concepts in business have been as popular and appealing in recent years as the emerging discipline of “open innovation.” It is variously described as crowdsourcing, the wisdom of crowds, collective intelligence and peer production — and these terms apply to a range of practices.The overarching notion is that the Internet opens the door to a new world of...To Learn More Click Here

Crowdsourcing the ultimate crowdsource index...

In an effort to benefit the crowd at large, we've happily taken on the task of compiling the Crowdsourcing Index, a comprehensive list of all the crowdsourcing sites and initiatives out there today. And we are looking to you, the crowd at large, to help. Please take a moment from your busy day and contribute to the big list.
To Learn More Click Here

The Influencers and the crowd...

Aside from using the "second degree" of your social graph or taste neighbors, a Social Relevancy Rank could front-load influencers. In the absence of any other metric, someone who is followed by hundreds of thousands of users is likely more relevant to you than someone you don't know at all. Using number of followers as a weight might be a good way to order the rest of the activity stream. In general, combing through countless tweets from strangers is not terribly useful anyway. Just as people have stopped looking at anything beyond the first page of results on Google, sifting through pages of tweets in chronological order gets tedious quickly. What needs to be incorporated into the Social Relevancy Rank is the aggregate sentiment of the crowd: a score that tells you yay or nay and gives you an opportunity to drill into more results if you choose.To Learn More Click Here

Is Crowdsourcing Museums the future of the memorable experience?

In the museum environment, it is sometimes suggested that audiences/creators and producers are willing to pay more for products and services if these are provided in an atmosphere that generates ‘memorable’ experiences...This thought-piece hopes to explore the demand-driven environment for design innovation, supported by establishing partnerships throughout the value-chain of development through a participatory process of design which seeks to engage both audiences and users in the design and development of cultual interactive experiences.To Learn More Click Here

Nieman Journalism Lab debates Crowdsourcing...

When we were drawing up the plans for the Nieman Journalism Lab, one of our goals was to create an environment for collaborative learning. We don’t know what the future of journalism will hold, but we’ll get closer to figuring it out if we can get as many smart minds working on the problem as we can. So it’s in that spirit that we announce the Lab Book Club. Every month, we’ll choose a book that wrestles with the future of journalism in some way and spend the month analyzing its arguments, debating its theses, and figuring out what it tells us about where the news business is going. For the first edition of the Lab Book Club, we’ve picked Crowdsourcing, by Wired reporter Jeff Howe. It’s an examination of how tasks once performed by employees are increasingly being performed by a large, undefined group of people. To Learn More Click Here

What's next for the movie business? Crowd Source Capital...

Filmmaker Paul Devlin hates fundraising. He would never solicit donations in a newsletter to friends and fans; he considers it an improper imposition. And don't get him started on fundraising parties. "I don't have the personality to do that," he says. "The whole idea turns me off entirely. That wasn't an option for me." So Devlin had high hopes that when he signed up as the first filmmaker to raise money on the website ArtistShare.com--which, since 2003, has helped musicians fund albums by allowing their fans to pay to participate in, or have access to, the artists and their creative processes-his days of fundraising agony were over. To Learn More Click Here

Crowd Sourcing business models...

While crowdsourcing is mainly focused on the knowledge and preferences of consumer (as input for innovation for example), crowdfunding is about the financing of projects and people by (large) crowds. Prime examples of crowdfunding are:

* Act Blue: Has gathered $22,863,961 for the Democrats since 2004.
* Prosper.Com: “Where people come together to borrow and loan money”.
* Zopa: “The first lending and borrowing exchange”.
* Kiva: “Loans that change lives”. A crowdfunded micro credit initiative.
* Grameen: “Banking for the poor”. Another crowdfunded micro credit initiative.
* Ringside Startup: A failed initiative, that has reincarnated to WeBothLike.
* First Giving: “Online fundraising for everybody”.
* Chipin.com: “The easy way to collect money” .
* Swarm of Angels: “Remixing cinema”. Create a million pound movie.
* Sellaband.Com: “Your Music, Your Choice”. Crowds have funded the recording of six albums so far.
* MyFootballClub: crowdbuying a soccer team.
What’s the relevance to managers and entrepreneurs? Mainly the crowdfunding of projects might open up new opportunities. As a company you can communicate more directly to your investors and circumvent the middlemen, i.e. the stock exchange, especially for specific projects. You can also liquidize more abstract objects (such as bands: Sellaband). Especially for entrepreneurs, opportunities arise. On MyFootballClub 50,000 subscribers will each pay £35 for the purchase of a soccer team, receiving an equal share and voting rights in the newly purchased club afterwards. Smart entrepreneurs could copy this business model to other projects and industries.To Learn More Click Here

Crowd-source your blog editing with gooseGrade...

Have you ever wished that you could have someone edit your blog posts for typos, spelling errors and grammatical mistakes? Most of us aren't lucky enough to have someone dedicated to catching and fixing our every mistake.Rather than asking one person to edit for you, why not effectively enlist the help of all of your blog's readers? That's what the folks at Brave New Code figured, anyway, when they decided to create the gooseGrade WordPress plugin.To Learn More Click Here

Is the solution to Healthcare, crowdsourcing?

The healthcare sector is under pressure to cut costs and extend care. Crowdsourcing may be a great way to do both. 'Crowdsourcing is a distributed product and problem solving model made possible by the Internet. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions.To Learn More Click Here

Mass Animation or Mass Exploitation?

Animators beware! There’s a new collaborative animation project called Mass Animation that is asking animation artists (both pros and amateurs) to come together via a Facebook application to produce a 5-minute CG animated short destined for theatrical release. The project hasn’t launched yet, but the details that are available on the official website and in this Intel press release aren’t encouraging. To Learn More Click Here

Crowd Sourcing produces animated film...

That teaser, posted last fall on Facebook by the upstart company Mass Animation, kicked off a project many people in Hollywood thought was laughable: making a five-minute animated film using the Wikipedia model, with animators from around the world contributing shots, and Facebook users voting on their favorites.But it worked. The completed short, “Live Music,” has been deemed of high enough quality by Sony Pictures Entertainment to warrant a theatrical run. To Learn More Click Here

How Not To Crowd Source...

While the world is still figuring out this new method of collaboration, we’d like to salute a few of those fearless, bleeding-edge teams that went out and made the mistakes, so no one else had to...full disclosure, I’m passionate about crowdsourcing. I’ve spent the last three years at Cambrian House, talking to people about what they do and how crowdsourcing might help them...To Learn More Click Here

Crowd Sourcing keeps Coming?

At Gotham Gazette, we're gathering our bearings and preparing work on a pretty great crowdsourcing project (though this business of talking something up before its even in beta testing does make the developer in me nervous) and I'm increasingly interested in really understanding what makes crowdsourcing work. It is everywhere these days, and it certainly is one way that we can be turning the Internet into a really effective reporting tool. Two new projects I'm watching? Adopt-a-Stimulus -- which I first caught wind of on Twitter -- asks individuals to pick one TARP project and track it. Steve Katz tried and hit a few walls, but it sounds like the folks at ProPublica are committed to staying on the project and working out the kinks. Cranes on Pause -- WNYC is asking listeners to map stalled construction projects. This one is one that Gotham Gazette has been brainstorming for a while, too long, I guess. I'm glad someone else had the same idea and the wherewithal to get it online! There are rumors that many, many developments are bankrupt or near bankrupt or were banking on fast-rising real estate prices that are decidedly not rising any more, but there hasn't yet been any clear reporting on whether the rumors are all just rumors. Cranes on Pause is a great first step towards a much clearer picture of what is happening to the city's building boom...To Learn More Click Here

Can Crowd Sourcing Deliver?

The world is changing, and for SEO folks it's getting much bigger by the minute -- witness the enormous growth of China. That causes a problem of scale for global marketers reaching new customers in new countries through their Web sites. Crowd sourcing enables you to reach more people more effectively through...Keyword research looks at historical terms that people have previously used in search engines and makes the assumption they will do so again -- umpteen thousands of people. Then by definition, keywords have already been chosen by the wisest crowd, so they definitely should win over the slightly less wise, but very helpful and enthusiastic, volunteers...To Learn More Click Here

Guy Kawasaki answers amongst other things....Crowd Sourcing rules!

Guy Kawasaki, Author, Tweeter, Creator, Venture Capitalist, Marketer and ‘owner’ of one mammoth Wikipedia entry. The man has it all and yet he still gets up everyday like the rest of us (and as we find out below not just to open cheques!). His bio shames even the most accomplished of professionals and yet he remains gracious and open. He kindly gave me some of his time to answer the following questions I had (along with some of @themediaisdying followers too – crowdsourcing rules!).To Learn More Click Here

Crowdsourcing Your Way Through the Mobile World

In the increasingly competitive world of mobile applications, getting to market quickly and app quality can make or break the success of a company. What has worked in the past in terms of testing applications (an in-house QA team or an outsourcing firm) is not conducive to the mobile world. Companies must test their software across multiple locations, languages, carriers, handsets, platforms and a host of other criteria. This calls for a new, revamped testing model -- crowdsourcing. To Learn More Click Here

The Wisdom of Crowd Sourcing...

From a strategic standpoint, it suggests to me that there are two types of crowd-sourcing contexts. In one, it’s helpful (or fun) to get the right answer, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t. In other cases (the $1 million question, diagnosing your child’s infection) mistakes have consequences, and only the right answer will do.
I think the crowd-sourcing literature needs to make more of this distinction. To Learn More Click Here

Direct Marketing Gets Social and crowd sources for ideas...

A good example of that includes creating social network groups to provide consumers a place to socialize and for brands to introduce new products, gain feedback, crowd source ideas, “energize” brand evangelists and listen/respond to concerns. Mashable has a good write up on brands that use Facebook Fan pages that do this such as Pringles, Coca Cola, Starbucks, Addidas and Red Bull.To Learn More Click Here

Submit Your Moonwalk Video

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Crowdsourcing a tribute to Michael Jackson...

A sincere example of crowdsourcing in action for a tribute to Michael Jackson. This could result in over a billion videos from all over the planet in memory to a genius...Click To Moonwalk

Google unveils Moderator: crowd-source good questions

Google Moderator is a unique new project designed to help the audience decide the best questions to ask at events like city council meetings or tech talks. We had some questions of our own for one of Google Moderator's engineers (who happens to be a long-time Arsian) about the project and where it's headed.To Learn More Click Here

Crowdsource Internet translation site looking for funding.

In consideration we're going to create a portal that would translate the English content (videos, podcasts, and blogs) into all other types of languages, including such languages as parhaps Polish, Spanish or Mandarin. This portal would use individual translators to accomplish that goal. Special tools will be set aside for those translators themselves and they will make their money off of the ad revenue generated from the viewer ship. Excellent translators will be able to translate for corporate clients of all types of content. The translators themselves will be rated by the viewers. Non marginal languages for instance African languages could be translated using grants which will be setup by the site from private donors for such purposes.
The Internet has its greatest growth internationally, now the content can catch up.
To Learn More Click Here

Mofilm crowdsources its way into Forbes Magazine

At last month's Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, Hiroki Ono of Japan walked away a winner. But he didn't take home a Grand Prix or Golden Lion. Ono, a 23-year-old aspiring filmmaker, placed first for "Feel the Globe." In the one-minute spot, a young couple struggles to stay connected while on opposite sides of the Earth; the young man uses his cell phone to take an upside-down picture of the sun. His girlfriend receives it instantly, along with his voice-over, "I know we share the same horizon. My sunset is your sunrise." Ono created the mini-movie for Nokia in a contest sponsored by Mofilm, a new mobile entertainment company. Mofilm aims to put amateur but talented videographers to work for brand advertisers like Doritos and Visa, producing short and catchy ads suitable for airing on mobile devices and the Internet. "Historically, with TV and captive audiences, you'd make a half-dozen videos and pay an agency, but now we're getting in a situation where you need dozens and dozens of videos," says Jeffrey Merrihue, Mofilm's 49-year-old chairman, who is also chief executive of Accenture Marketing Sciences. "If you did that through traditional agencies, production budgets would go through the roof." To Learn More Click Here

Crowdsourcing lustration and vigilante justice

Surfing the blogs of the Russian extremists - what a fun job I have! - I stumbled upon a link to an interesting new site called Shpik. The site advertises itself as a "database of people liable for lustration". A quick historical note: "Lustration" is not just another fancy GRE world; it's been quite common in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s, mostly as a means of purifying the state of the former communist apparatchiks (lustration never really reached Russia).Here is the original notice that greets visitors to the site (in my own translation, which is probably not ideal): "Dear visitors! For the first time in the history of modern Russia, you are looking at a regularly updated database that lists people liable for lustration. People who have committed human rights violations while on duty and who have participated in repressions against the opposition, activists and mere dissenters.Comitting their crimes, many of them are sure that they will remain unnoticed and unpunished. But this ain't so. Sooner or later, every person mentioned on this site would need to publicly account for what they have done." Currently, the site features the profiles of 441 "criminals", as well as 175 "events", 23 testimonies, and 191 photos. One can easily add new names and events to the site - it relies on the Wiki principle of "anyone can contribute". The objective, as far as I understand, is to identify future candidates for lustration and document their misbehavior. There is also an interesting section for those officials who have not yet been fully identified - some may be missing a photo or a full title - and anyone can fill that in, in the good old Wikipedia spirit.To Learn More Click Here

Shpik.info

Respected visitors of shpik.info At last, now for the first time in the history of modern Russia shpik.info brings you a constantly updated database of those, who are subject to be held accountable for their crimes and be brought to justice. Those, who carried out offenses during the performance of their function and responsibilities, are active participants in the repression of the opposition, and civil activists and the simple discordant. Committing these crimes, many of them think that they are assured that they will remain unnoticed and unpunished. But this is not so... Sooner or later there will come a time, when each of the mentioned on the site will now be forced to answer for what they did. All law-breakers in the database are distributed for categories in accordance with their kind of occupations and positions held...The site is in Russian so try babelfish to translate it...
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