Designchords.com crowdsources itself into a crowded design space...

This was twittered to us. New from India...A new startup with an aim to create a level playing field for both new startups and upcoming designers across the globe. By establishing a virtual market through creative crowdsourcing, they hope to show the world the untapped potential of the POWER OF THE MASSES.
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Invasion of the Not Quite Dead, a horror movie wants to crowdsource 100,000 pounds...

This project was twittered to us...Invasion of the Not Quite Dead is an upcoming (expected 2009) Horror film directed by Tony Lane. In 1978 a meteorite crash lands into the Swiss Mountains, unleashing a deadly virus. Killing everyone within a 20 mile radius, the incident was covered up by local officials. Now thirty years later the virus is released onto an unsuspecting island off the coast of the UK. A group of survivors must band together in order to survive the death and destruction of the once friendly locals in this black comedy horror "Invasion Of The Not Quite Dead"
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Audi crowdsources for car designs using Facebook fans...

Audi has asked its 300,000 Facebook fans what functionality and features they'd like to see on a new vehicle in 2030 as part of a competition at the Los Angeles Auto Show, which has challenged vehicle manufacturers to design a youth-oriented car of the future. Videos created by TurnHere encourage fans to participate in the design challenge, while follow-up discussion questions solicit specific feedback, such as 'How will your car play a role in keeping you connected to your digital world in the future?'The videos showcase real Audi designers sharing their design philosophies and visions for the future of the automobile. Brad Stertz, spokesman for Audi of America, said the contest helps fans of the vehicle understand and engage with the passion of the brand's design team
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Facebook mirrors Google with crowdsourcing agenda

Journalists and Silicon Valley insiders alike often wonder aloud why venture capitalists have reportedly poured $716 million into social networking startup Facebook Inc., giving it a massive valuation estimated by some at $15 billion. Facebook may have dropped a hint as to why in a new patent filing on language translation technology that TechCrunch noted last night.Facebook has melded technology and human intellect via crowd sourcing to create a better language translation technology.
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Facebook Wants To Own Idea Of Crowdsourced Translations

Apparently Facebook is trying to patent the idea of crowdsourced translations of its service. The actual patent application was filed in December of 2008, but the real priority date (I believe) is December of 2007 (when I think the company filed a provisional patent). This one caught my attention for a few reasons -- with a major one being that way back in March of 2006, some friends of mine were working on a startup called Gabbly, which did online chat, and they had amazing success with crowdsourcing translations.
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Is Crowdsourcing the Future of College Education?

A course at Duke University will allow students to take over aspects of teaching and grading. How will it influence future college courses?
Putting Faith in Her Students. This fall, Duke University students in professor Cathy Davidson's "This is Your Brain on the Internet" course will explore the use of crowdsourcing—when a group takes over a task typically performed by an individual—in education, putting collaborative learning methods and peer review to the test.
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GeniusRocket crowdsources brilliance!

It started as a coincidence, turned into a real possibility and resulted in a bona fide solution to my problem. At the risk of translating my giddiness into hyperbole, the idea behind GeniusRocket (and CrowdSPRING, the company that led me there -- see a ReviewCam of CrowdSPRING here) is well on its way to becoming THE new model for custom service exchange on the web. I'm sold, if for no other reason than because it delivered. GeniusRocket is an online creative service experience, where you can submit your project, name your price, set a deadline and, through a network of artists and experts, you suddenly begin to get the creative solutions you were seeking. Not just ideas or sketches, but real work. As the deadline draws closer, more bids come in.
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Crowdsourcing the message Lotus Knows campaign

Lotus isn't just doing this campaign in a vacuum either, they are going to the community and end-users themselves to come up with all of the best things that Lotus Knows. This is being done through an award-winning Lotus Domino-based third party product called Idea Jam. Idea Jam is a platform to crowdsource ideas. If you've never heard the term crowdsource, Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as "the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call."
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Mofilm crowdsources its new compettion - user generated mobile film contest

That big MOFILM Cannes Lions User-Generated Content contest with Spike Lee is being followed by a second online competition connecting some of the world's biggest brands with filmmakers creating for the smallest of small screens.
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Small nonprofit uses ‘crowdsourcing’ to attract philanthropy

When it comes to raising money, smaller nonprofits may find it difficult to attract philanthropy. However, some may find that technology can be a great equalizer.That was the case with Critical Exposure, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that has only four staff members. Though it is small, the nonprofit firm was able to raise $15,669 from 614 donors during GlobalGiving’s U.S. Open Challenge. GlobalGiving is an online marketplace that showcases a variety of causes, charities and projects.
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Innocentive crowdsources its way into europe with $7,300,000 from Spencer Trask

InnoCentive Inc., a Waltham company focused on crowd-sourced innovation, said it has closed a Series B-2 funding round for $7.3 million. The round was led by Spencer Trask Ventures Inc., a New York-based venture firm, InnoCentive said in a press release. The plan is for some of the new funding to be used to open an office in Europe, InnoCentive said.
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A crowdsourcing success story - The Netflix Prize: It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over

The Netflix Prize, a remarkable crowdsourcing experiment, refuses to die: runner-up teams have joined forces to overtake the first team to qualify for a $1 million payday by coming up with a movie recommendation system at least ten percent better than the company’s own technology. Teams Bellkor (AT&T Research), Big Chaos, and Pragmatic Theory combined to form Bellkor’s Pragmatic Chaos, the first team to qualify for the prize on June 26 with a 10.05 percent improvement over Netflix’s existing algorithm.
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Microsoft begins to crowdsource Microsoft Office...

Microsoft workers seek Office suggestions.Two Microsoft employees have unveiled a crowd-sourcing Web site inviting suggestions for how Microsoft Office could be improved.Got a suggestion for a better Office? Here's your chance to be heard.
Steve Zaske, a product planner on the Office development team, wrote in a blog post Monday that the site, MakeOfficeBetter.com, was inspired by Dell's IdeaStorm site. On both sites, the public can submit suggestions for product improvements, and other people rank the submissions to establish their popularity and priority.
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Crowd funding begins to finance German TV Shows on the web....

upcoming internetseries on www.emmastahl.de . Here is the project: "Emma Stahl is a special agent for the european police unit EuForce. This elite team fights organized crime in europe. Where normal police action does not go anywhere, Emma Stahl is called. Her bosses tolerate her unorthodox methods grudgingly as long as they lead to success. Emma Stahl is addicted to adventure and beautiful women. A somtimes fatal weakness." The project is financed by crowdfunding. So we definitely need your help to raise enough money to produce this internetseries.
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10 Things You Must Do to Earn Your Audience’s Trust

Brandon Mendelson is the coordinator for the Business Card Build-Off, part of America’s largest crowdfunded project, A Million High Fives. Follow @BJMendelson for project updates. Lincoln once said, “With the public trust, anything is possible. Without it, nothing is possible”.
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Shapeways opens 3-D creation marketplace to crowdsourcing

Got an idea for a 3-D design you’d like on your desk or dresser? Starting today, a company called Shapeways will let you hire people to design and build it. The company takes a page from Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” marketplace, which allows developers and businesses to crowdsource tasks for a price. Shapeways‘ version is intended specifically for the creation of 3-D models.
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Crowd Source: Children to design new Beano character

Minnie the Minx, Dennis the Menace, Gnasher the dog and friends are to be joined by a new Beano character, which will be designed by children at the Edinburgh international book festival this weekend. The sold-out event on Saturday morning will see former Beano writer Morris Heggie, editor Euan Kerr and two illustrators work with festival-goers to come up with a new character for the classic comic.
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Amanda Hesser And Merrill Stubbs Crowdsource a Cookbook With Food52

These days, more and more books have accompanying Websites and smart authors even try to attract readers online before the book is even published. Sometimes they even try to enlist those potential readers into contributing to the book (for free). Brooklyn food writers Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs are crowdsourcing their next cookbook on a site that just launched in private beta called Food52 (it will open up on September 15, but you can sign up now for an invite at the site)
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The Guardian crowdsources the history of the internet...

We're looking to compile a history of the internet, by the internet. Want to help?
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Quirky.com crowdsources your invention from idea to store shelf

Got a genius idea for a product? How about a tofu press? An iPhone holster to perch on bike handlebars? A fashionable sling for broken limbs called an “Ouch Pouch?” Ben Kaufman, a 22-year-old entrepreneur and college dropout, wants you to dish out $99 and put it in his hands, or shall we say, Web site, along with an entire community of nitpickers to mold your product from scratch to store shelf.
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Crowdsourcing for Small Businesses

InnoCentive is an Andover, Mass.-based company best known for crafting challenges that let companies, known as seekers, pose a design or development problem to a community of 180,000 independent solvers, who vie for rewards of between $5,000 and $1 million if they crack the answer. The company once catered mainly to large corporations, but according to President and CEO Dwayne Spradlin, "we are beginning to work with smaller and earlier-stage companies." The company is also forming partnerships with venture capitalists who see these challenges as an inexpensive way for the companies in their portfolio to have more efficient R & D, according to Spradlin. This in turn means a lower risk for the VCs' investments. Over the next five months InnoCentive will be testing this expansion, dubbed InnoCentive for Start-ups, in Silicon Valley.
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Phoning It In

The brave "upstanders" of the DRC--the group Women's Synergy for Victims of Sexual Violence, for example--would have the tools to report instances of abuse, crowdsourcing sexual violence the way Clinton hopes young Kenyans will crowdsource anti-corruption efforts. The people of the Congo certainly don't lack for courage. Perhaps mobile phone technology can give them the tools they need to take action against the thugs and war-criminals who are ripping their society apart.
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Crowdsourcing software firm Imaginatik lands $2.6M

Imaginatik plc, a Boston enterprise software company, has pulled in $2.6 million from new and returning investors.The company focuses its software development on crowdsourcing — reliance on customers and users to create the software and services to fit company needs
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IndieGoGo: Cause Awareness Through Entertainment

IndieGoGo is a socially-driven platform built on the concept of crowdfunding, creating a central location where independent filmmakers can showcase their work, and fans can show their support through microdonations right on the site.
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2008 - How Cambrianhouse.com turned into Vencorps.com

Although this video was created in 2008, it is still useful to learn how business models adapt to change for survival..

Groupon.com crowdsourcing on Fox Business Channel

Andrew Mason CEO Groupon.com interviewed on Fox Business Channel. An example of an exceptional crowdsourcing success, profitable three months after launch, with a business model through group buys, saving consumers $10,000,000 with repeat clients.

Online marketers harness the power of crowds

Savvy online businesses are beginning to realize the power of crowdsourcing, in particular online marketers who are increasingly opening up the tasks of designing ads, writing copy and even marketing research to large groups of people across the globe.
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Trampoline founder jumps on 'crowdfunding' idea

Charles Armstrong, 37, Trampoline's founder and chief executive, has come up with an alternative plan: what he calls "crowdfunding" – using the internet to let as many rich people around the world with at least £10,000 to invest know that they can take a stake in the business.
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crowdfunding.trampolinesystems.com

indiegogo.com crowdsources $ for films..

IndieGoGo provides tools for fundraising, promotion, and discovery to the film and media industry. The platform enables people to showcase their work, mobilize their fans, and DIWO (Do-It-With-Others!). Founded on the principles of opportunity, transparency, choice, and action, IndieGoGo launched in 2008 to address the fundraising challenges and market inefficiencies affecting independent filmmaking today. IndieGoGo enables this "filmocracy" by providing filmmakers an open platform to pitch their projects to the world, and giving the fans a vehicle to experience and influence the once inaccessible world of filmmaking. Filmmakers get resources to build and engage a loyal fan base to assist in making their projects happen. They can raise money and awareness, and gain credibility through their number one resource: their fans.Fans get the opportunity to discover, share and directly impact the films of their choosing while also getting insider access and VIP perks.

"Lipsmackin' thirstquenchin' acetastin' motivatin' goodbuzzin' cooltalkin' highwalkin' fastlivin' evergivin' coolfizzin' Mofilm.

As main sponsor at the 53rd Times London Film Festival taking place October 14th to October 29th 2009 MOFILM wants to give an ordinary creative the opportunity to walk with the stars and change their lives. MOFILM will shortly be launching its second user generated content competition with some of the world's biggest brands including AT&T, Best Buy, Campbells, Hewlett Packard, McDonald's, Nokia, Pepsi and Unilever (OMO) - with more to be announced.
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Careerbuilder.com uses crowdsourcing to make their new commercial...

Do you have a creative idea for a CareerBuilder.com commercial? If so, enter it in our contest! Times are tough and we want to put your idea to work. Who best to think of a TV advertising idea targeted towards job seekers than job seekers themselves? Now its time to vote on the submissions...
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Co-Creation is Driving Change in the Way we Work

A driving principle behind co-creation is the idea that as consumers we want things to be done “with us” rather than “at us” or “for us”. It is a principle at work that will drive change across all aspects of our society. Today my blog covers briefly how it will change the way we work.
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Co-Creation Is Changing The Way We Are Governed

Co-creation and its underlying philosophy of wanting to have things done with us rather than at us are also driving change in the way we want to be governed. The new buzz word here is “Government 2.0” or the Conservative Party’s clumsier version “the post bureaucratic age” where things are not dictated to us from above through “command and control” but are driven up from below through community collaboration and co-creation.
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GlobalSight Adds Crowdsourcing to Its Vision

Welocalize today announced CrowdSight, an open-source, browser-based translation tool for crowdsourcing. Paired with the GlobalSight translation management system (TMS), CrowdSight lets translators and reviewers work with translation memory without the burden of learning the full GlobalSight interface for professional translators.
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Star Wars fans, may the crowd-source be with you

Last week, we wrote about the first crowd-sourced animated short. This week, there’s a new crowd-sourcing project in the works, Star Wars: Uncut. The project has enlisted Star Wars fans to recreate 472 scenes, each spliced into 15-second clips, from the film “Star Wars: A New Hope.” Participants can choose up to three scenes to film and have 30 days to upload their new work to the site.
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Crowdsourcing Helps Chicago Chamber of Commerce Find More Bus Riders

During preparation for the 2009 Innovation Summit, the chamber was approached by InnoCentive, a company that specializes in using crowdsourcing to help clients solve problems, said Chicagoland Chamber Foundation President Lance Pressl. For a fee, InnoCentive helps its clients design a challenge...
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Jigsaw doubles revenue again

China Martens, an analyst for the 451 Group, said Jigsaw is the only company using so-called crowdsourcing, the strategy of asking members of the public to voluntarily contribute and update contact data. Jigsaw has a clear track to an initial public offering if the economy improves, Martens said.
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Companies Embrace ‘Open Business Model’

“No one company has a monopoly on great ideas, and every company, no matter how effective internally, needs to engage deeply and extensively with external knowledge networks and communities.”
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Movie reviews meet crowdsourcing on Twittercombing site

LONDON - Interactive design company magneticNorth has launched a social media movie barometer called Skinni Popcorn, which provides real people's opinions about the latest films in real time and also drives traffic to the New York Times. The Skinni Popcorn website features Twitter feeds of users' real time comments about newly released films and the current US box office top ten, as well as the top ten most talked about movies at present.
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10 kickass crowdsourcing sites for your business

Of course there’s more to life than usability testing. So what else can be crowdsourced? It turns out that there are plenty of dedicated crowdsourcing services that can be used for businesses. I've collated a bunch of the best ones, and some of them are really great. Check them out…
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Flickchart.com crowdsources people's opinions on ranking movies....

We now have over 20,000,000 (twenty million) rankings submitted by our 18,000+ beta testers. Thanks for all of your support and feedback!
flickchart.com

Crowdsourcing' puts many extra hands to work

The August long weekend goes by many names in Canada – Simcoe Day in Toronto, Colonel By Day in Ottawa, and British Columbia Day in B.C. – but the most common is simply Civic Day. On this Civic Day, it is worth noting how our civic institutions are rapidly being transformed by open government mandates that leverage the power of the Internet to foster greater transparency and public engagement. The City of Vancouver has led the way with the adoption of a resolution in May that endorsed open and accessible data, open standards, and open source software. The open data component states, "the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns."
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Crowdsourcing work...

I have been interested in crowdsourcing for a while. The power of the internet is the power of connections, and crowdsourcing allows people to make connections that would be impossible without it. This is true whether it links fans of some obscure 80’s TV show, or people looking for work. I have a Google alert set up for crowdsourcing, and it recently threw me this blog post criticizing one of the freelance logo design sites. In these sites, you typically put up a prize of around $250 and many designers compete to try to win the prize. I have used these kinds of sites before, and been happy with the results.
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Social Financing - An alternate financing...

I was going through an interesting article on BigThink today. There is no doubt, the culture is shifting towards 'Social Financing'. Some call it as ‘Crowd Funding’. Crowd funding, inspired by crowd sourcing, describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowd funding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns.
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A Guide To Crowdfunding success..

It seems as though everyone is crowdfunding or backing a crowdfunded project. Tim Ferriss, author of the popular “4 Hour Work Week”, backs Litliberation, which he claims “out fundraised Stephen Colbert by a 3:1 margin”, and you can’t go an hour on Twitter (Twitter) without hearing about the latest Twitter fundraising initiative.
But until now, there has not been a clear guide on how to get started, and so here’s what you need to know before diving into a crowdfunding program (and how to succeed.)
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Fund Raising Through Crowd and Peer-to-Peer Banking

Capital is the life blood of the free market economy. The future of capital will not be the conservative bankers and the over-paid investment bankers. The future of capital, I believe, is the crowd, i.e. crowd funding and peer-to-peer banking. Rather than counting on a few venture capitalists, crowd funding raises fund by appealing to a large, really large, number of ordinary people for small donations or investments. So far it has worked brilliantly for a number of cases in the media industry, film and music making, by attracting funding from the community of future customers.
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The crowd-sourced company

I came across this...The large, hierarchical corporations that dominated business in the 20th century will not completely disappear in the 21st century, but they will become less important. In their place will be new, more flexible ways of organizing large-scale work that provide great freedom and take advantage of people’s energy and creativity. All of them will depend on the Internet.
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New crowdsource project - Princeton sociologist Matthew Salganik looking for developer...

Princeton sociologist Matthew Salganik and computer scientist Ed Felten are seeking an exceptional web developer to work on an open source social computing research project. The project seeks to develop a new form of social data collection that combines the best features of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Using the power of the web, we are creating a "crowdsourcing" data collection tool that has the scale, speed, and quantification of a survey while still allowing new information to bubble up from respondents as happens in interviews, participant observation, and focus groups (alpha version). We recently received funding from Google that will allow us to hire a contractor for one year.
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