Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Crowdsourcing Done Wrong: the Vegemite iSnack Naming Disaster

What's with all the negative articles on crowdsourcing. First Forbes and now this...you decide. This article is all about how Kraft got it wrong asking the people to come up with a name for their product. Well with the competition actually on the label of the jar they sold 3,000,000 jars and now with all the backlash and press they get to sell another 3,000,000. Like Madonna they need people to talk about it, in this case the crowdsourced name, so I am and they will sell more jars. If the objective is to create publicity they achieved the goal. The more ranting and raving there is the more product they will sell. Mission accomplished. Read the article and see if you agree or disagree?

Here's one for the marketing textbooks. A marketer on the verge of launching a new product turns to the unwashed masses to come up with a name. Only in this case rather than spark a bunch of consumer interest, the brand stewards managed to spark a global backlash. That's what's happened to Kraft Foods as its rolled out a more spreadable version of the Australian favorite Vegemite. More than 48,000 people responded to a call to come up with moniker for the new combination of cream cheese and Vegemite, a popular spread made from yeast extract. The winner, as coined by a Australian web developer who, by his own admission, has his tongue planted firmly in his cheek: iSnack 2.0.
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Crowdsourcing: Startup Hopes To Shake Up DYI Facebook App Market By Sharing Ad Revenue

A new startup thinks it can take a slice of the booming make-your-own Facebook app market with a seemingly simple strategy: Pay users to create apps. AppBank, which launches today, gives users a cut of the ad revenue generated from the ads that surround the basic polls and quizzes they build...Hsu, along with a partner, started Oversee.net nine years ago and then sold some of their holdings in the company to Oak Hill Capital Partners for $150 million a year-and-half ago. He’s funding AppBank with his own cash; the startup currently has six full-time employees. The plan is to eventually expand to include other social networks and also let users create more sophisticated apps. “We acknowledge that quizzes and games and gifting apps are sort of the fad,” Hsu says. “(We want to be on top of the) next series of popular apps that end users can crowdsource themselves.”
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The Myth of Crowdsourcing

In this article Dan Woods a journalist from Forbes.com sets out why the theory of crowdsourcing is a delusional concept and the only true crowdsourcing company out there is Jigsaw...Read it and see if you agree. He cites the individual, for example, Steve Jobs over the crowd's input. Dan says...

Crowds don't innovate--individuals do. The recent coverage of the $1 million Netflix prize was rightly heralded as a victory for crowdsourcing. The competition was designed to create a better algorithm for recommending films. But in the popular press, and in the minds of millions of people, the word crowdsourcing has created an illusion that there is a crowd that solves problems better than individuals. For the past 10 years, the buzz around open source has created a similar false impression. The notion of crowds creating solutions appeals to our desire to believe that working together we can do anything, but in terms of innovation it is just ridiculous. There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos...
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Sunday, September 27, 2009

How Twitter and Crowdsourcing Are Reshaping Recruiting

So think of the untapped potential opportunities for companies looking to source and attract talent. As social media is used inside the company to increase collaboration, communication and innovation, it's become important for recruiters to locate prospective employees who are also users of social media. Using Twitter can level the playing field so that smaller firms can find those people as effectively as the Fortune 500 do. And those companies who have turned toward Twitter have found it an efficient way to identify passive job candidates who might not be scanning job boards.
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Saturday, September 26, 2009

Francesco D’Orazio on outsourcing to the masses...

Barely a day goes by without a website, campaign or competition cropping up, promising to harness the collective wisdom of crowds – the likes of you and me – for the benefit of brands. brand-e spoke to Francesco D’Orazio, md of crowdsourcing and co-creation specialists Face Wired to get the skinny.Firstly, for those who have been living under a rock this summer, what exactly do we mean by crowdsourcing?
Well, there are a number of definitions and, depending on your speciality, it may vary slightly. Essentially, it’s when a company broadcasts a problem to a crowd instead of getting one or two experts to work on solutions. It’s outsourcing to the masses - the key elements for most forms of crowdsourcing are peer-reviewed collaboration and bottom-up idea generation. What are the benefits to brands in going down this route? It’s a very productive way of using crowds. Crowdsourcing, in one form or another, has been around for about 15 years, but with social media, brands have found a way of harnessing crowd creativity on a much larger scale. And there is huge value for brands in this method. They get a global, diversified crowd, a wider range of talent, rich spontaneous insights - plus it’s cost effective, and it provides great word-of-mouth for the brand. Sounds like a marketing director’s dream. Are there no drawbacks? Crowdsourcing by itself is a bit limited, you need a top-down approach to counteract it – there has to be some way to funnel the data and ideas generated. Plus, crowdsourcing tends to be more of a vertical process, there is lax collaboration - the best solutions come when people are allowed and encouraged to build on each other’s ideas. Also, because crowdsourcing is not targeted, brands cannot afford to give too much away about company strategy, meaning briefs can be somewhat limited in detail. Are there workarounds? When we work with brands we use a process called co-creation. It’s phase two, after crowdsourcing. It’s a way of brands collaborating directly with selected people from the crowdsourcing phase, to respond to a brief. Rather than conversing with 5,000 people as they would in crowdsourcing, they are talking to 20 to 25 highly targeted individuals through on- and offline activity. Co-creation provides the strong, strategic thinking that is missing from crowdsourcing.It gives a more direct communication between brand and consumer? Exactly. Somebody has always played the role of middleman between brands and consumers, be it agencies or experts. Social media has exposed the flaws in that system and brands have realised the need to have a continuous, ongoing relationship with the consumer. The cartel of media owners, agencies and brands that has existed up till now has been blown open. Brands now know they have to put consumers and online communities at the heart of what they do.
Does that mean brands relinquishing more control? It’s not about handing over control, it’s about collaborating. If brands open up too much, they lose control of consumer expectations, which is the most dangerous thing that can happen. People start expecting things that there is no chance the brand can deliver. Giving up too much control will eventually lead to a backlash from the consumer. There is an abundance of platforms offering crowdsourced solutions: crowdSPRING, 99 Designs, Zopa and Mofilm.comspring to mind. Is this a real shift in advertising, or is it simply an ad fad? These kinds of sites will have an impact on the number of creatives hired by agencies long term. It makes sense for brands and agencies to rebalance and redistribute the roles within their organisations, but it would be a mistake for people to put too much emphasis on crowdsourcing. There will always be a need for people with expertise to provide top-down analysis of the ideas generated. Crowdsourcing will still exist in five years time but I think most of these sites will have disappeared - most likely, one or two will hold a monopoly.
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Friday, September 25, 2009

Crowdsourcing: 5 Reasons It's Not Just For Startups Any More

Next-generation enterprises looking to drive efficiency and innovation have recently been able to tap into online communities to offload work. For the first time since outsourcing became prevalent in the 90s -- making it easier to move tasks out to partners that could do something better or more cheaply than you could -- businesses now have a new, potent, and often far cheaper option thanks to the Web. Frequently referred to as crowdsourcing, and a darling of the Web 2.0 industry, it has recently come of age as the tools and marketplaces for on-demand work capacity on the network have expanded far beyond the early volunteer communities that originally proved out the concepts. These pioneers, which include the world of open source software and online services such as YouTube and Threadless, get most of their value from a large group of people or community through the simple use of an open invitation.
How Crowdsourcing Works...

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Crowdsourcing takes center stage at DEMOfall '09

Network World - One unmistakable trend at this year's DEMOfall show is the number of Web sites and applications that rely to some degree on crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing –- a buzzword loosely defined as giving large crowds of users the ability to collaboratively create or change content on Web sites or applications -– was made popular by open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia and has since become a staple of Web 2.0 applications. Among the new crowdsourcing technologies to debut at DEMO this fall are Article One Partners’ AOP Patent Studies, an open-source enterprise service that employs an online community of patent advisors to research patent claims; Waze, a mobile application that can be used to update traffic conditions in real time; TrafficTalk, a mobile application that is similar to Waze but also lets users provide traffic updates simply using their voice rather than typing into their mobile phone; Micello, a mobile app that aims to be the Google Maps of indoor spaces; and Answers.com, a Web site that combines established reference resources and crowdsourcing to create a comprehensive information database. So why does crowdsourcing have such an appeal for developers?
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Jigsaw’s Business Model Is Built on Crowdsourcing

Jim Fowler, chief executive of Jigsaw, is fond of saying his Web-based start-up is following the Wikipedia formula. It is, but with some notable differences — and ones that suggest how the crowdsourcing model can be made to work in the real world of business. Jigsaw, based in San Mateo, Calif., is a Web directory of business cards and company records. Its database of 17 million contact records and 3 million company records is growing rapidly, Mr. Fowler notes, thanks to Jigsaw’s “community” of more than 1 million members who build and maintain the database. Its membership of registered users is expanding by 1,500 a working day.
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Fluther Raises $600k From Top Valley Investors For Crowd-Sourced Answers

Fluther, a slick service that lets you outsource your questions to other members on the web, has closed a $600k round of seed funding from some of Silicon Valley’s most notable investors. Included in the round were Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Dave McClure, via FF Angel. Rounding out the roster are Twitter’s Biz Stone and Leonard Speiser (Bix, Twables founder), who are advisors...Fluther soft-launched back in summer 2007, and is seeing around 600,000 monthly unique visitors. Tonight’s news confirms reports of a funding round based on SEC filings.
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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

A crowd-sourced translation of The Lost Symbol: is this copyright infringement?

Dan Brown's latest novel, The Lost Symbol, was released on September 15. His last book, The Da Vinci Code, was wildly popular in China and propelled translations of his earlier novels onto bestseller lists as well. The latest thriller, which follows the further adventures of intrepid symbologist Robert Langdon, should sell well over here too.Once it's translated, that is. People's Literature Publishing House expects a Chinese edition to be on shelves sometime in 2010.Chinese Internet users can't wait that long, so Yeeyan, a collaborative translation website, has launched a project to crowd-source the translation of The Lost Symbol into Chinese. They've already posted the prologue and the first two chapters.
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Michael Robertson Wants To Crowdsource Proof Of EMI's Lies: You Lie EMI Bookmarklet Available

EMI has been involved in a lawsuit with MP3Tunes for a while now. The whole lawsuit seems weird, since MP3Tunes is about creating a storage locker for the songs you already have. But one of the points that MP3Tunes made in response to EMI's claims is that EMI was lying in saying that it has never authorized MP3s to be available online. Yet, MP3Tunes had found plenty of promotional tracks that EMI had clearly put online, and it was wondering why others were allowed to link to them, but EMI claimed it was infringement for MP3Tunes to point to those same songs. In presenting this point in court, MP3Tunes has been looking for more evidence of authorized EMI mp3s, and Michael Robertson has an...
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LiveOps Creates a Crowdsourcing API

Last week, LiveOps announced the availability of LiveWork API, which enables companies to integrate existing business workflow applications with LiveWork's virtual workforce platform. Launched in 2009, LiveOps' defines LiveWork is an on-demand service that brings the benefits of crowdsourcing and cloud computing to the world of business process outsourcing...LiveOps' CEO Maynard Webb, as a former president of eBay, is no stranger to helping to create new business models. Liveops has built an on-demand platform that allows companies to venture into crowdsourcing without building their own infrastructure. With LiveWork service, LiveOps is making its on-demand platform, initially designed to handle contact center interactions, available for additional types of work. The platform enables companies to outsource high-volume, repetitive tasks to virtual teams of freelancers.
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Monday, September 21, 2009

7 pm today, screen lesson for the world: don’t be stupid

Mumbai On Tuesday, along with other cities in over 40 countries, Mumbai will learn how not to be stupid. The lesson is scheduled to begin at 7 pm when the The Age of Stupid, a futuristic documentary-drama-animation on climate change directed by UK-based director Franny Armstrong will be premiered at Blue Frog in Lower Parel, along with screens in cities like Berlin, Buenos Aires, Turkey and Thailand across Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the US. The documentary-drama-animation hybrid starring Oscar-nominated Hollywood actor Pete Postlethwaite (of the The Usual Suspects fame), traces the life of an old man — the only man alive — in the year 2055, when runaway climate change would have ravaged the planet...The film was made with cash raised from ‘crowd-funding’ a concept of selling ‘shares’ to 223 individuals and groups in UK interested in the issue of climate change. About 450,000 pounds were collected by funding, a film representative said from UK.
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Sprowtt Launches Marketplace for Earlier-Stage Investments in Pre-Public Startups

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- 09/21/09 -- Sprowtt unveils plans for an alternative stock exchange that lets people invest directly in high-potential startups and gives access to much needed capital from millions of micro-investors. The company introduced its platform at the TechCrunch50 conference last week. Sprowtt was one of 50 companies hand-selected from more than a 1,000 to launch at TechCrunch50 2009. Sprowtt is making the case for stock offerings of smaller companies. Sprowtt was founded to address the inaccessibility of capital markets for smaller investors and small companies. Increases in cost, compliance, and complexity have nearly shut down the IPO market. For smaller companies, capital markets have been inaccessible for a long time, which is a contributing factor in the IPO crisis. Today, a company typically requires a billion dollar valuation to go public...Sprowtt investments can be as low as five dollars -- the price of a latte. By lowering the investment barrier, this maximizes investor choice and encourages diversification among large and small investors alike.
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Sunday, September 20, 2009

Kickstarter model crowdfunding a horror movie one leg and an arm at a time...

Getting your band's song featured in a campy horror film: $1,000. Dying a gory death on camera (complete with blood and dismemberment): $2,000. Finally, finally getting your 15 minutes of fame: Priceless. At least, that's what the producers of "Dr. Bonesaw" are banking on. Literally."Dr. Bonesaw" -- the story of a sexy serial killer who unleashes a reign of terror on an equally sexy hospital staff -- is billing itself as "the first horror feature funded by the victims." The producers are seeking funding not from executives at Warner or Universal, but from people like you. On the Internet. It's easy: you pledge them money, and in return they give you a role in the production.
Using "crowdfunding" website KickStarter, the producers at Lead Balloon Studio are inviting horror film fans to become investors, and are incentivising them with a long menu of gory-good options.
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Friday, September 18, 2009

The Washington Redskins Crowd-sourcing Their Games

The Redskins hope to get reaction from all fans through a new site called Redskins Twackle that does more than just pull tweets having a #redskins hash tag. In addition, they are pushing an iPhone App that will help crowdsource this data into the Redskins Twackle site.
redskinstwackle.com
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Delaying Your Social Media Marketing: Lose Audience, Consumers, Trust

Social media marketing has become a bridge to consumers with companies all over the world. Target uses Facebook to “crowdsource” ideas for where they should donate their charitable contributions. Dell crowdsources their audience on Ideastorm.com to generate ideas for their products and services while providing a voice to their consumers. Starbucks, this summer, provided a free pastry day giveaway on Twitter which generated 6 figure returns, a mountain of publicity, and thousands of new followers on Twitter.
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BuyWithMe.com's Crowd-Powered Site Unites Consumers and Local Businesses Coast-to-Coast...

BOSTON, Sept. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- BuyWithMe, Inc. (www.buywithme.com), the collective purchasing site with a cult-like following, announced today that it has met a key milestone: its customers and merchant partners have saved and collected over $1,000,000 in less than four months since it's launch. The concept (http://tiny.cc/viewwithme) is the brainchild of a group of young,entrepreneurial Bostonians and has recently launched in DC and San Diego, with a national roll-out planned. BuyWithMe leverages a "Power in Numbers" approach to negotiate both city-specific, limited time discounts and create social experiences exclusively for its members. Promotions are often 50% discounts and greater and have included offers from premier brands like Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego, Grettacole day spa in Boston, The Patriot's Pro Shop, and wagamama. With seed investments from friends, family, and a handful of angels, BuyWithMe has grown quickly through grassroots word-of-mouth and a social media savvy user base. Boasting tens of thousands of users, an active Twitter and Facebook following, and loyal fans, BuyWithMe has generated over 10,000 transactions since launch.
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Thursday, September 17, 2009

Rick Warren Crowdsourcing New Book Cover on 99designs.com

Designs pouring in for the cover of new book by The Purpose Driven Life author.GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., Sept. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- 99designs.com, the largest marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design, last night announced that best-selling author Rick Warren is running an open design project for the cover of his new book, The Hope You Need: from The Lord's Prayer, to be published by Zondervan. Since that announcement, the website is being flooded with designs. "As of 11 a.m. East Coast time today, 327 designs have been submitted to the website," said Steve Sammons, Zondervan's Executive Vice President of Consumer Engagement. "We're announcing this morning that the winning design will now receive $5,000 rather than the original $3,000." The Hope You Need: from The Lord's Prayer, scheduled for hardcover release on November 17, was inspired by a sermon series Warren taught at Saddleback Church in Orange County, CA. It invites readers to plug into the unparalleled power that exists within the words of the best-known prayer on the planet. With his classic approachability, passion and candor, Warren will provide helpful insight and much-needed inspiration for reviving whatever seems to be dying in life. In talking about this new book Warren said, "It may be your marriage, your bank account, your career or a long-held, deep-seated dream. Anything needing renewal today can actually be brought back to life." For more information and the specific requirements of Rick Warren's book cover design project, visit: http://99designs.com/contests/28531. The deadline for submissions is 11:59 p.m. (PST) September 19, 2009 and the winning designer will be paid $5,000. Warren's website for the book, www.thehopeyouneed.com, also has a link for the design contest. 99designs.com connects clients needing custom design work, such as logos and websites to a thriving community of over 46,000 talented designers who submit a new custom design to the site every 12 seconds. To date, 99designs.com has awarded more than $6 million, with more than $400,000 paid to designers in the last 30 days alone.
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Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Crowdsourcing a horror movie called The Pact ...

Henrik Sylven has decided to crowdfund his new horror movie called The Pact. Really interesting animation storyboards can be seen in the spec video...Visions, student pacts, demon killers and then they too become part of the deaths that they dream about, or is it a trap, and finally there's the possessions...creepy stuff. Join him and make a horror movie. From what we saw he's a very talented director, writer, animator...Contribute to the story. Download and remix the film.
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Alistair Duncan's participationmarketing.co.uk says, "the next wave of crowdsource business model will see crowdsourcing gatekeepers emerge"

“The question for creative agencies is whether they can wake up, react to what’s going on, engage the crowd, and make themselves a part of the new reality.” So says Jon Winsor (Crispin Porter’s innovation guy) in Business Week, and Alex Bogusky on his blog this last week. Crowdsourcing is on the increase, but it’s no longer a fashionable or trendy business idea. It’s a real model for customer engagement. And the pressure is on creative industries to work out how to manage it. The oft quoted Dell IdeasStorm and My Starbucks Idea are great examples of endeavour to gain customer approval, but how many of the ideas suggested actually got produced or implemented? Not very many, is the answer. And the reason? It’s pretty tough to review 7000 ideas. The next wave of crowdsource business model will see crowdsourcing gatekeepers emerge.Watch this space people. Participation marketing is a reality.
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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

CrowdFlower Bolsters a New Era of Work

San Francisco (PRWEB) September 15, 2009 -- Statistical quality control technology finally makes cloud labor a viable business reality with the largest pool of workers ready to handle your job 24/7. CrowdFlower (www.crowdflower.com), a TechCrunch50 company, launched today at the event. CrowdFlower is the first Labor as a Service (LaaS) offering to hit the market - similar to cloud computing, LaaS is labor in the cloud. The Company also today announced an angel investment round which closed in March 2009. The round included venture capital firms: Freestyle Capital, Founder's Fund, K9 Ventures, Quest Venture Partners and Felicis Ventures. And individual angel investors: Alex Edelstein, Auren Hoffman, Gary Kremen, Lorenzo Thione, Steve Bennet, Travis Kalanick and Barney Pell. CrowdFlower taps into the world's largest labor pool, over 100,000 workers across 80 countries, and creates a human platform for cloud computing with an on-demand, online workforce.
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Crowdsourcing reveals 600 search engine flaws

A competition for software testers to reveal bugs in major search engines has unearthed over 600 in Google, Google Caffeine, Bing and Yahoo. The Battle of the Search Engines, as it is known, was carried out by uTest, which uses crowdsourcing to test software. Over 1,100 software professionals from over 50 countries took part in uTest's Battle of the Search Engines. Of the 600 bugs found, about 78 were said to be "show stoppers" - or very serious flaws. Google had 130 bugs, with 8% show stoppers, Bing had 321 bugs, of which 14% were showstoppers, and Yahoo had 70 bugs, with 10% showstoppers, said the report. The project measured the accuracy of search results, speed, real-time relevance and overall usability of the websites. Google was seen as the best in every category. But it also revealed that 30% of software professionals were "favourably surprised" by Microsoft Bing's and 10% want it as their default search engine.
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TC50: CitySourced Lets You crowdsource Pot Holes And Graffiti On The Go

Ever seen a nasty pot hole or a wall full of graffiti and wished you could report the problem on the go instead of writing a letter or email to your city bureaucracy? TechCrunch 50 startup CitySourced is launching an a slew of smartphone applications that let you file an issue to your city from your phone, aiming to crowdsource this information for cities. It’s pretty simple. The app on your Blackberry, Android or iPhone lets you take a picture of the infraction. The app detects your location via GPS and once the image is loaded and approved, you are brought to the reporting screen. You can then identify what the problem is, add comments, and Tweet the problem out from your Twitter account. Once you press “file”, the report is captured, bundled and automatically transferred to the government agency that is responsible for the infraction. On the back end, the city agency gets a web dashboard that lets them see how many reports have been submitted, a map mashup of where the reports are located, pending reports that are incomplete, and graphs that break down reports by type over a given period of time. Cities can then download all the data into a file. The app is free for the user and cities pay an annual license fee for the dashboard. CitySourced has just inked a deal with the city of San Jose, Calif. San Francisco recently implemented a similar plan to crowdsource city complaints via Twitter, but the ability to use a location-based app via CitySourced is compelling both for users and city governments. CitySourced has just received an investment from Palm and will be launching on the Palm Pre soon.
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Monday, September 14, 2009

Love a local business? Buy a share... and crowdsource your capital...

HASTINGS-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. (Fortune Small Business) -- John Halko was halfway through renovating an expanded space for Comfort, his mostly organic eatery in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., when the credit crisis hit. His source of funding -- a home-equity line -- ran out, so he applied for a loan at a local bank. He was turned down. Halko wasn't ready to throw in the dish towel. His solution? The modern equivalent of an old-fashioned barn raising. Instead of soliciting neighbors to lift timbers, he asked them to open their wallets. For every $500 they purchased in "Comfort Dollars," his patrons received a $600 credit toward meals at the restaurant. As the community rallied around Comfort, Halko says, "it gave us hope." He raised $25,000 in six months, and the new, larger space - now called Comfort Lounge -- opened for business in May. Plenty of entrepreneurs are turning to their communities for support in these tricky times. As the recession wreaks havoc on America's economy, finding the money to launch, expand or even just sustain a small business is often a struggle. In the second quarter of 2009, venture capital funds raised the smallest amount since the third quarter of 2003, according to the National Venture Capital Association in Arlington, Va. Banks continue to pull credit lines and credit cards from many small businesses. Even proprietors who are willing to extract capital from their homes -- often their biggest personal asset - can't always do so, because the declining housing market has left so many homeowners underwater. But entrepreneurs are resourceful, and as the economic crisis forces them to seek new sources of capital, a growing number appear to be finding money in their own backyards. After all, local customers have a personal incentive to invest in their favorite businesses. And while no one is officially tracking the trend, anecdotal evidence suggests that the practice is growing. "There are no secure returns out there right now," says David Lavinsky, co-founder of Growthink, a venture investment firm headquartered in Los Angeles. "People are very willing to invest in their local community, especially if there is the possibility of return." In January 2009, Vox Pop, a popular bookstore and coffee shop in Brooklyn, was drowning in $190,000 of debt, including overdue rent, unpaid city health department fines and expenses from a failed expansion. Desperate, CFO Debi Ryan offered shares in Vox Pop for $50 apiece, calling community meetings and buttonholing patrons as they came through the door. Each share entitles its holder to a small dividend once Vox Pop's debt is paid. In 10 days Ryan raised $64,000 from newly minted shareholders -- enough to keep the business afloat. With that capital came an unanticipated bonus: Vox Pop's customers-turned-shareholders visited the shop more frequently than they had before, coming in to buy everything from their morning coffee to children's birthday gifts. "With this many shareholders we have a ready-made customer base," Ryan says. "Everyone wants to see Vox Pop succeed." Lavinsky says Ryan's observation is spot-on. "When a customer is a shareholder or supporter, ego is involved," he explains. "If I give you a check for $5,000, I don't want you to fail." Jeff and Tami VandenBerg, siblings who own the Meanwhile Bar in Grand Rapids, sold $5,000 worth of "Meanwhile Money" certificates as they were building their pub. That turned out to be a smart move. When they opened for business in 2007, certificate holders showed up in droves to spend their "money." In the bar business, crowds beget crowds. They've never left. Says Tami: "It really brought a sense of community ownership to the bar. People felt vested in us." For most small business owners, relying on the largesse of neighbors isn't a viable long-term survival strategy, but it can offer a shot in the arm during times of crisis or change. The VandenBergs, for example, used their community funding to install a tile floor and lighting while they waited for a bank loan to come through. "In the big picture it was a small percentage of what we ultimately spent," says Jeff. The largesse can be considerable. In April 2008, when Kim Harmson decided to open Kizuri, a fair-trade gift store in Spokane, she was able to raise $73,000 from 11 investors in the city's activist community at a low interest rate of 3%, with no prepayment penalty. Harmson admits she had many sleepless nights before the store opened last October. She need not have worried. Since Kizuri's launch Harmson has met or exceeded sales projections every month -- an accomplishment she credits in part to her community-funded business model. Consultants say honesty is the key to successful relationships with community patrons. As with any investor, a detailed business proposal should be offered, explaining why the funds are needed and what your benefactors will get in return. "You don't want to come across as a fly-by-night person looking for a handout," cautions Warren Neuburger, the CEO of 40billion.com, a startup Web site that promotes community-based business fund-raising on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. And though it's essential to be candid, do your best to avoid sounding desperate. "As a business you never want to say 'I'm hurting,' " says Paul Gregory, a lawyer who specializes in small business issues with the New York City firm Herrick, Feinstein. Larry Matthews, owner of Back Bay Grill in Portland, Maine, knew he had to install an air conditioning system in his restaurant to stay competitive. But amid deteriorating economic conditions he was reluctant to dip into cash reserves or to make a large purchase on credit. In June 2008, Matthews approached a group of his best customers, explained his need for cash and offered to sell them $1,500 restaurant gift certificates for $1,000 apiece. He raised the $12,000 he needed in one day. Then he faced an unexpected issue: As word of the certificates spread through the community, customers who hadn't gotten a chance to buy them began calling. They wanted in on this great deal. Some were upset that Matthews hadn't sought their support. "I was surprised," he says. "People got a real kick out of the idea. They liked that I wasn't relying on a bank."
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Time to crowdsource that baby bottle

Tot sourcing. German baby brand MAM has launched a crowdsourcing contest, Feel Good Style, to get ideas for looks for bottles and dummies. Designers need to get their hands on a MAM pack to create their images for the brand’s 2010 Online Shop Collection – each participant can submit as many as five designs. As usual in such crowdsourcing competitions, consumers get to vote on submissions and select a shortlist of 15 designs. A MAM jury will choose the three winners, with a top prize of €900 up for grabs.
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Sunday, September 13, 2009

Don't Look Now, but the Crowd Might Just Steal Your Ad Account

Unilever Takes Practice Further Than Most, Sacks Lowe on Peperami Biz. LONDON (AdAge.com) -- For some time, marketers have been using ad contests as one-off PR ploys for their brands. Now, Unilever is testing whether crowdsourcing can be a long-term strategy for one of its British brands -- and the result could have far-reaching consequences for any number of agencies on the consumer-goods giant's roster. Unilever said it believes mainly creatives will crowdsource ideas for Peperami, not the general public. Unilever said it believes mainly creatives will crowdsource ideas for Peperami, not the general public. Just ask Lowe, London, which was recently sacked by Unilever on its Peperami snack brand so that the marketer can run a contest to find ad ideas. Unilever is offering a $10,000 bounty to the winner of a competition to find TV and print ideas for the meat snack popular with schoolchildren. Matt Burgess, managing director of the Unilever division that owns Peperami, said, "Lowe has done great work on the account over the years. They've created a strong creative vehicle that's extremely well-defined and very portable. But their great work has created a problem for them, because it makes Peperami the obvious candidate for crowdsourcing." What's more, Unilever isn't holding this up as a publicity stunt designed to appeal to average consumers. It actually expects that professionals in creative businesses will respond, and that's precisely who the pitch is marketed to. Oh, and if you think you're safe on some other Unilever account, beware.
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From Concept to Cash in 365 Days with crowdfunding

I started researching crowdfunding as an alternative. I came up with the unusually bright idea of selling advertising space on the back of 300,000 business cards. $1 gets someone an advertisement on one card, and they buy as many as they want. The incentive is that the cards are being used to set a Guinness World Record for "tallest wall made out of business cards," which makes them desirable and a collectible piece of advertising after the record is set. A Million High Fives is the project I'm attempting to crowdfund and form a new business around. Although A Million High Fives is supposed to accomplish many things, I also want it to make crowdfunding a cool thing to do. If I can do it, you can do it. And if we can do it, then who needs sponsorship or venture capital?
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FCC Launches Social Network for ‘Crowd-Sourcing’ Ideas for National Broadband Plan

WASHINGTON, September 11, 2009 – The Federal Communications Commission continues to expand its social networking efforts. On Friday, the agency launched a crowd-sourcing platform, Ideascale, at http://broadband.gov/ideascale. The Web 2.0 tool allows users to comment on particular points in a national broadband plan, voting items up or down on a rolling scale, or to add new ideas into the mix. As of 12:51 p.m., the top three ideas on the site were “Broadband plan must address needs of people with disabilities;” “Some specific points about accessibility,” including obtaining detailed disability information in surveys and market research activities, and “Data coordination” between the FCC and other government agencies. In a statement, the FCC said that “crowd-sourcing allows the online community to discuss, evaluate and rank ideas. The platform will be especially useful as the Commission develops a National Broadband Plan, which will provide a strategy for reaching all Americans with robust broadband.”
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Saturday, September 12, 2009

Doritos crowdsourced Super Bowl ad contest raises the stakes; winners could earn $5M

In the last Super Bowl, two unemployed brothers from Batesville, Ind., won Doritos' $1 million prize by finishing first in Ad Meter — and beating Madison Avenue's big-budget pros — with an ad about a guy who shatters a vending machine with his crystal ball after predicting free Doritos for everyone in the office. This time, Doritos is offering $1 million for placing first in Ad Meter; $600,000 for second and $400,000 for third. If the spots finish 1-2-3, each will get a $1 million bonus, for a total of $5 million in prizes. This is a new world where one person (online) can make a difference to millions," says Ann Mukherjee, group vice president of marketing at Frito-Lay. "If we can trust them with our brand, they become better ambassadors than we can ever be." Folks enter by uploading self-made spots at www.crashthesuperbowl.com from Sept. 21 to Nov. 16. Six finalists will be named in January, and online consumer voting will pick the three to air in the Super Bowl.
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Friday, September 11, 2009

Crowdsourcing Presentation Content with Twitter

What's Crowdsourcing? According to Wikipedia, crowdsourcing is outsourcing a task to a large group of people in an open call. For example, when I was asked to present on the topic of social media & reputation management to an audience of college students earlier this month, I turned to the community at Twitter as an exercise in presentation content crowdsourcing. Using the medium to help create the message, I posed my situation and asked a question: Within hours, I received a dozen or so intriguing replies. It struck me that many of the replies looked -- and read -- like fortune cookies. So I felt whimsically inspired to use a prophetic design treatment for some of the Twittered replies. Ergo,
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Salesforce.com Helps Businesses Manage Social Networking, Crowdsourcing

With the new Salesforce.com Service Cloud, small businesses can manage their Twitter activity and crowdsourcing within their Force.com CRM platform. For small businesses using Salesforce.com, the popular cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform, jumping on the web 2.0 bandwagon just got a lot easier.
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Zimride saves the planet by crowdsourcing our empty car seats

Zimride saving the planet one ride share at a time...For too long we have driven our cars with empty seats. Zimride is a simple way to find friends, classmates and coworkers going the same way you are.Combining social networks and our proprietary route-matching algorithm, we’ve made it easy to share the seats in your car or catch a ride. Zimride empowers you to create social, sustainable and convenient transportation. Together we can get anywhere.
zimride.com
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Thursday, September 10, 2009

A great take on Crowdsourcing by Alex Bogusky

We recently crowdsourced a logo design for Brammo. They are a brilliant bunch of folks making electric motorcycles. We received over seven hundred submissions which I think blew everybody’s mind involved. But when I think about myself as a young designer who had to make up fake projects to work on anything remotely as cool as motorcycle company logo it makes sense. The idea that I could have access and an even playing field -- plus I could make 950 dollars more than the lady who designed the Nike logo -- would have had me designing in my sleep.
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Crowdsourcing Star Mofilm.com launches video channel to promote London Film Festival

Wednesday 9 September: The programme for The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival, announced today by Artistic Director Sandra Hebron, includes a diverse selection of world and international premieres with a total of 191 features and 113 shorts screening alongside an exciting line-up of special events and expected guests.
Opening Night film, Wes Anderson’s FANTASTIC MR. FOX, is one of the Festival’s 15 world premieres and will be presented by the director and cast members including Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman and Helen McCrory. Other films celebrating their world premieres include Sam Taylor-Wood’s Closing Night Gala NOWHERE BOY and the Festival’s first ever Archive Gala, the BFI’s new restoration of Anthony Asquith’s UNDERGROUND, with live music accompaniment by the Prima Vista Social Club, led by Neil Brand. The Festival will also host 23 European premieres, including Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s MICMACS, Scott Hicks’ THE BOYS ARE BACK and Robert Connolly’s BALIBO, as well as Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni’s THE WELL and Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson’s MUGABE AND THE WHITE AFRICAN. The 4 international premieres that will be featured are 45365 from Bill and Turner Ross, Celine Danhier’s BLANK CITY, Mike Judge’s EXTRACT and Rumle Hammerich’s HEADHUNTER. Festival audiences will also have the chance to enjoy the UK premiere of John Lasseter’s TOY STORY 2 in Disney Digital 3D™.
mofilmchannel
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Tweetdeck will Crowdsource Information Filtering

Tweetdeck, the popular, free Twitter client, is expanding its reach to Facebook and MySpace. The new versions of the desktop and iPhone program let you post to all three networks and read feeds from them, all within the same interface. The big idea here, according to Tweetdeck founder Iain Dodsworth, is to make Tweetdeck a more powerful way to keep up with everything — like a web browser for socially distributed information, be it news, memes, or photos. “Instead of just being a Twitter client, we want to be a new type of browser,” Dodsworth said. “Instead of browsing web pages, we want people to use Tweetdeck to consume all different sources of real-time data… [this] is the first step towards that vision.” In addition to the MySpace and Facebook integration, which worked smoothly when we connected multiple accounts, the new Tweetdeck lets you group Facebook friends into subgroups, so you can follow work friends, personal friends and frenemies in separate columns. (Tweetdeck presents your social media feeds as a series of highly configurable columns — essentially, you get one for each account, group or service.)
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tweetdeck.com
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Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Will VitaminWater's Facebook App Make Us Smarter About Crowdsourcing?

Before we begin with our deep thoughts about flavored water, here's a brief rundown of the crowdsourcing program: The brand has added a "flavorcreator" tab to its Facebook page (which currently has almost 475,000 fans), allowing people to vote for the next VitaminWater flavor, the ten finalists having already been determined. (A cloud and a ranking list within the app shows what flavors are currently the most talked about. At this writing, green apple and mint were running one and two.)...I'm a little confused about why ultimate decision-making goes to 50 Cent (a company investor) and Carrie Underwood. Shouldn't the winner be the one most people voted for?
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facebook.com/flavorcreator
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Million-Dollar Crowd Sourcing:

Shankman has since grown HARO, which started out in 2007 as a Facebook application, into a million-dollar business built around a mailing list of 100,000 press-hungry readers..."Open my e-mail and you can wind up on the front page of a national newspaper, or on the Today Show," he says. The cost? Just a couple clicks.
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helpareporter.com
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Service uses twitter to crowdsource ideas overnight

If two heads are better than one, it's hard to argue with the premise of crowdsourcing, which taps multiple brains for a common end. Now offering such capabilities overnight is Ideas Culture, an Australian firm that puts creative thinkers around the globe to work via Twitter to solve a client's problem by morning.
Businesses with a challenge to solve can enlist Ideas Culture's "Ideas While You Sleep Service" to get a pack of ideas along with an evaluation matrix and implementation plan by 10 a.m. the next morning. After registering, they need only submit their challenge online by 4 p.m. By 6 p.m., Ideas Culture gets the challenge out to its Twitter-based Ideas Agents, who spend 15 to 30 minutes each on the problem. There are more than 200 agents from eight countries on the books, and each earns AUD 100 for four sessions, according to a report in the Age. Problems tackled so far have included recruiting more male customers for a singles matching service and increasing attendance for professional development events, The Age reported. Pricing—normally AUD 880—is now AUD 495 through a special trial offer. Is there no stopping the power of the Twitter-enabled crowds? London's Royal Opera House is another organization that apparently doesn't think so. For more on putting that power to work for your brand, check out trendwatching.com's briefing on foreverism. Time to start thinking in 140 characters! ;-)
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ideasculture.com
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Tuesday, September 8, 2009

waze Drives into the iTunes App Store, Offers First Free Crowd-Sourced Maps for iPhone

PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– waze, Inc., the first free provider of driver-generated maps and real-time road information, today announced the availability of its mobile application in the iTunes App Store. Through a community of drivers, waze harnesses driver-generated data to build road maps and provide real-time traffic information to commuters. Unlike static maps and first-generation traffic networks, waze relies on a community of drivers to both populate the maps and provide daily traffic information. As more and more iPhone users download and use the app, the maps and traffic information will become more robust and accurate over time. iPhone users can download the app today from iTunes today. “This is just the start of a crowd-sourced project that will change the way drivers make their daily driving decisions,” said Noam Bardin, the company’s CEO.
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Crowdsourcing Dinosaurs

We want to put together a paper on the multiple independent transitions from bipedality to quadrupedality in ornithischians, and we want to involve everyone who's interested in helping out. We'll get to the details later, but the basic idea is to amass a huge database of measurements of the limb bones of ornithischian dinosaurs, to which we can apply various statistical techniques. Hopefully we'll figure out how these transitions happened -- for example, whether ceratopsians, thyreophorans and ornithopods all made it in the same way or differently. So, in order to accomplish this enormous project, they founded the Open Dinosaur Project - you can be a co-author of the resulting paper if you contribute! What is the idea? To crowdsource the effort. Published measurements need to be all copied into a single place for analysis. Bones not yet measured as well - if you are at a museum or university or in some other ways have access to the fossils, you can take your measuring tools and go down to the vaults and send in the numbers.
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Click To Crowdsource Dinosaurs
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Unilever goes crowdsourcing to spice up Peperami's TV ads

Unilever is offering $10,000 (£6,087) in a competition to find ideas for its next TV campaign for snack food brand Peperami, using its quirky Animal character, as it decides to drop its ad agency of 16 years and turn to crowdsourcing for creative ideas.
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Click To Enter
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Crowdpowernow.org - Pioneering Crowd Sourcing Site Enables Vast Public Review of Health Care Reform Bill (HR 3200)

As debate continues to rage on healthcare reform in response to HR 3200, America's Affordable Health Choices Act, a new document crowdsourcing site, HealthcareForUS.org, is launching a unique opportunity for every voter to shape the debate on healthcare reform. HealthCareForUS' approach is to harness the power of millions of citizens (“the crowd”) to generate a summary of the bill and provide their opinions about specific sections of the legislation. Lawmakers will benefit by having the bill summarized and by having data to understand their constituents' concerns and desired actions.
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FSA should relax rules for Funding 2.0, says crowdfund pioneer

The Financial Services Authority should relax its rules on who can invest in companies to stop early stage technology companies from becoming victims of the recession, said the founder of a company that has taken an unusual approach to raise funds. Charles Armstrong, founder of Trampoline Systems, has called on the City regulator to open up investing to more people to increase the sources of funding that struggling entrepreneurs can access. Trampoline is pioneering a web-facilitated 'crowdfunding' process whereby it asks many small investors to take a stake in the company. Companies traditionally ask a small handful of venture capitalists to invest millions of pounds at a time, but Trampoline is asking for 100 investors at £10,000 per stake in a bid to raise £1 million. "This is a technique that's become quite well established in the film industry and in the music industry but it's really the first time that anybody's used it to finance a technology venture at the scale that Trampoline is operating at," Armstrong told podcast OUT-LAW Radio.
Trampoline has pioneered the process in the UK and has found that Financial Services Authority (FSA) rules designed to protect inexperienced consumers from being targeted by scams make crowdfunding more difficult. Armstrong said that a company is not allowed even to approach or talk to anyone who has not certified themselves with the FSA as an experienced investor or a high net worth individual.
"Financial Services Authority were not drawn up with this kind of funding process in mind," he said. "We had to spend a lot of time understanding very closely what the different areas of regulation that this touched were." "The FSA has a very important role to protect consumers from scams and that is an absolutely legitimate function that they serve," said Armstrong. "At the same time I think there is an argument for some reform of the regulations to enable crowdfunding techniques and other internet era investment techniquest to be operated with a little less bureaucracy around them." Armstrong told OUT-LAW Radio that his company had turned to crowdfunding because more traditional investors had retrenched and were investing more conservatively. They are now either reducing the amount they invest or are investing only in companies that they have already supported in order to ensure their future, he said. Trampoline makes software that enables people in companies to see who knows whom or who has particular knowledge. The software analyses people's communication patterns and builds a pattern of links between them. The company announced its crowdfunding plan three weeks ago and has already raised £330,000, a third of its target. Armstrong said that he expected this figure to grow as more potential investors made their way through the FSA administrative process. Trampoline is documenting its crowdfunding process online. Armstrong said that he believed such openness was in the spirit of the crowdfunding methodology. "Part of what we're really hoping to achieve is to share the information about how we made it work so that it's easier for other businesses to consider the same course," he said. "I think that's part of the ethic of crowdfunding, that it's very much about being transparent."To Learn More Click Here
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Monday, September 7, 2009

Crowdsourcing – it’s war!

Logo battles. Buenos Aires-based Connaxis pulled in close to 400 designs in four weeks for the contest to create a logo for its new Guerra Creativa creative community platform. Connaxis - which tags itself a ‘creative outsourcing specialist’ - says the new platform can be used by companies “to crowdsource creative work to a community of quality designers. It sets itself apart from other crowdsourcing initiatives due to its playful battlefield concept, community arena, profiling functionality, modern design and multilingual application.” And true to the platform’s name, Connaxis leans heavily on the warfare lexicon. “Guerra Creativa is a community platform for the creative,” the outfit says.
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5 Ways to Attract and Empower Your Crowd

Every few days, I get an email asking this question: “I have this awesome idea to help X, but I’m not sure what direction to take. Do I open things up to the crowd to collaborate and target a mass audience? Or do I put everything together myself and target a specific group?” This is a question everyone from the biggest brand to the smallest start-up is asking: should you go with the crowd or should you go niche?
But before you make a decision, let’s take a look at these paths and what they offer.
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Saturday, September 5, 2009

Kickstarter.com: Got a dream but no cash? The Internet can help

NEW YORK, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Chris Waddell wants to climb Kilimanjaro in a wheelchair; George Del Barrio wants to make a film in Cambodia; Jeff Edwards wants to write a book about a science fiction writer: they want you to fund their dreams.
A website called Kickstarter.com is making it possible for people like this to raise sums ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars to fund anything that captures the imagination of Internet users with a little money to spare.
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Thursday, September 3, 2009

Kickstarter.com The Next Big Thing on public radio NPR in USA

An interview with Perry Chen the co-founder of Kickstarter.com which has just brought in $500,000 in pledges for various projects and is now going to begin to charge 5% for projects to raise funds.
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Kiruba Shankar on “Crowdsourcing Tweet” and some

New crowdsourcing book coming soon in tweet form. Kiruba Shankar is working on his 2nd book on Tweeting called “Crowdsourcing Tweet” and spoke to us about the finer nuances of tweeting and how it’s here to stay. Kiruba Shankar likes to keep busy and when he is not tweeting, he works on his Think Tweet book series. The 2nd of which he is working on presently called” Crowdsourcing tweet”, a book of ideas that read like tweets. He talks to MyBangalore about what makes Tweets sweet and how crowdsourcing is the way forward.
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