Victors & Spoils Launches First Advertising Agency Built on Crowdsourcing Principles

It was only a matter of time! BOULDER, Colo., Oct. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- John Winsor, Claudia Batten and Evan Fry today announced the launch of a new advertising agency, Victors & Spoils, the world's first creative ad agency built on crowdsourcing principles. Crowdsourcing is the act of digitally delegating a task to a crowd of people or community that passionately participates in developing a solution. The new agency will provide businesses with creative solutions to their marketing, advertising and product-design problems, by engaging their customers, as well as a creative department made up of the world's most talented people. Perceived crowdsourcing flaws will be addressed through world-class creative direction delivered through the use of the reputation-ranked Victors & Spoils crowd. Winsor will serve as Victors & Spoils' Chief Executive Officer, Batten assumes the role of Chief Operating Officer and Fry comes on as Chief Creative Officer, effective immediately. Victors & Spoils represents a fresh agency model that offers brands an alternative to ad agencies and current crowdsourcing platforms by offering the strategic direction, engagement and relationship management that brands rely upon their agencies to provide, as well as delivering the engagement, return on investment and results that marketers seek from crowdsourced solutions.
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victorandspoils.com

Paranormal Activity grosses $67,000,000 on a $15,000 budget!

User-generated content = crowdsourcing...Discuss! In this fourth installment from frequent guest blogger Chris Dorr, he tries to make sense of what Paramount’s innovative viral campaign for Paranormal Activity really means going forward: One “truth” that you hear quoted over and over is that there is no way to make money from user generated content. Paramount, to its delight, is currently finding out that this “truth” is actually a lie. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY will deliver to Paramount the largest return on investment (aka ROI) of any movie it has ever distributed. It could even deliver more cash to Paramount’s bottom line than TRANSFORMERS 2, its largest grossing movie of 2009. All of this from a piece of user generated content that runs 86 minutes and cost its creator $11,000 to make. But now you say, “It is not user generated content, it’s a movie!” And I respond by pointing out that if someone gets an idea, has a little money, writes a script, finds a cast and crew that works for free, shoots digitally, and creates something that lasts 1 minute, 20 minutes, 86 minutes or 5 hours—- it is user generated content. We are living in an age where the tsunami of user generated content is just beginning and the distinctions between these pieces of content and professional content will matter less and less. What matters most of all is something Paramount discovered during the release of this piece of UGC. Does someone really want to see it? If you approach your audience in a relevant way they will pay for this UGC and the number of people who will pay can get very large. And in this case the relevant way to get the audience for PARANORMAL ACTIVITY was through a marketing strategy called crowd sourcing.
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Crowdsourcing Your Candy This Halloween

Geeks and ghouls rejoice: The Internet has come up with a way to boost your Halloween haul. The folks at Zillow.com have created their first Trick or Treat Housing Index, which draws on the site’s real estate data to determine the top-five neighborhoods in Seattle and Los Angeles to maximize candy intake this Saturday. How’d they do that? “There is a common belief that wealthy neighborhoods are the Holy Grail for harvesting the most Halloween candy,” blogs Zillow’s Whitney Tyner. But to provide what it calls a more holistic approach, Zillow factored in home values alongside additional data on population density, neighborhood walkability, and local crime. “Based on those variables, this Index represents neighborhoods that will provide the most candy, with the least walking, and minimum safety risks,” she wrote. In Seattle, the neighborhood of Wallingford came out on top. In LA, it was Venice. Alas, Zillow hasn’t calculated its index for other cites.
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zillow.com

Could Redbox Crowdsource Its Way Around Movie Studio Blockades?

From the connecting-with-fans dept... Last week, we wrote about the legal battle Redbox is facing with some of the movie studios. Redbox, of course, rents DVDs at a $1/rental from vending machines that it places all over the place. Some of the studios are upset that (a) they don't get a cut of each rental and (b) that Redbox also sells those DVDs. So they've been trying to force Redbox to sign agreements that would give them a royalty cut and which would put limitations on Redbox -- such as not renting out videos until well after the DVDs are released and also having the company destroy, rather than sell DVDs when they were done renting them. Of course, the labels don't have much of a legal claim here. Redbox has every right to buy DVDs and to then rent them (right of first sale and all that). But, what at least some of the studios have done is to demand that DVD wholesalers not sell to Redbox, which certainly seems like a typical restraint of trade situation. In at least one case, a studio has also told downstream retailers, like Walmart and Best Buy not to sell to Redbox either.
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Crowdsourcing: Testing the Limits with John Winsor

What does the future of crowdsourcing look like? uTest: The hottest debate in crowdsourcing right now is the “fall” of traditional advertising or design firms and the “rise” of crowdsourced services. In your opinion, what does the future of crowdsourcing look like? Is the world ready for what you call the “digital tsunami?”
John Winsor – author, entrepreneur and crowdsourcing expert...JW: Well the future of crowdsourcing is definitely bright, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions in people’s minds. Those who are skeptical of crowdsourcing question its ability to truly connect people. With crowdsourcing, you no longer have all of these professionals working together in the same building – that alone is often too much for some people to come to terms with. The idea of a crowd aggregating to solve business problems in a virtual environment is entirely new to most people, even though the underlying trend has been developing for years. The difference now is that it simply can’t be ignored.
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Could crowdsourcing save Microsoft?

SAP Should Give Microsoft Crowdsourcing Ideas.

Microsoft is making a lot of hay about using customer inputs to improve Windows 7. CEO Steve Ballmer made repeated allusions to the influence of customer feedback, which he said during the Windows 7 event in Manhattan Thursday resulted in “intense collaboration between our own engineering organization and our partners … and our customers..." This isn’t a matter of crowdsourcing for the sake of boosting its Web 2.0 credentials — it’s a matter of rescuing Microsoft’s inability to innovate. How is Microsoft, for all its vast resources, going to compete in the long run when it’s so clearly already run out of ideas, unless it reaches out to customers in a truly meaningful way? (Its stunning loss of market share in the smartphone market is a direct reflection of how poorly Microsoft innovates in a dynamic market. Microsoft has gone from dominance to irrelevance in a few short years because it simply has no new ideas to offer, while Apple, Research in Motion, Google and Nokia have created platforms that allow customers and partners—like app developers on the iPhone platform—to innovate on their behalf...
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Crowdsourcing the Brain 2

Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009 | Traditionally, the study of the brain was organized somewhat like an archipelago. Neuroscientists would inhabit their own island or peninsula of the brain, and see little reason to venture elsewhere. Molecular neuroscientists, who study how DNA and RNA function in the brain, didn't share their work with cognitive specialists who study how psychological and cognitive functions are produced by the brain, for example. But there has been an awakening to the idea that brains of humans and mammals should be studied like the complex, and interrelated systems that they are. Neuroscientists realized that they had to start collaborating across disciplines and sharing their data if they wanted to make advances in their own field. However, this realization came with a conundrum: Researchers in the modern era have come up with so many different ways to obtain data -- microscopes, MRI machines, super-charged computers -- that they've literally compiled more data than they know how to share... "We are swamped." Ellisman and his UCSD colleagues have devised a solution: crowdsource a brain.
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Crowdsourcing: Why it’s Not a Waste of Time

Crowdsourcing. You’ve probably heard the term over and over, and when I began to hear it from Dwayne Spradlin of Innocentive as he presented at the inaugural Social Media for Sustainability conference in San Francisco on Monday, I began to tune out. A buzzword with not a lot of tangible results. A recipe for messy, small-results projects. But what he did earlier got my attention. He said that if we in the audience as a group of 100s could synchronize our claps in under 45 seconds, he’d donate to a charitable cause of note. We did it in about 10 seconds. Trivial as this may sound, it served as a micro example of how, given the right incentives, people can coordinate and focus activity towards a goal, getting results faster than otherwise thought possible. In his presentation, “Creating Value Together – Online Collaboration and Competition Networks,” Spradlin gave several real-world examples of opening, widely, to help get supposedly intractable problems solved quickly.
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Crowdsourcing From Online To Traditional Airwaves

Triton Media Group, which provides programming to 4,500 radio station affiliates, has signed an agreement with Jelli to syndicate two Internet programs on FM and high-def stations. The Top 40 Jelli and the Rock Jelli programs are scheduled to go live across the U.S. early next year. The deal surfaced after Jelli began testing the application with CBS Radio Bay Area affiliate Live 105 KITS a few months ago. The Sunday night Jelli show on Live 105 also led to an agreement with Australian-based Austereo. In November, the station will launch a Hot 30 Jelli show on stations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. The stations will broadcast the show on FM and digital radio (DAB+), and it will be available online 24 hours daily. The concept is the brainchild of Jelli co-founders Michael Dougherty and Jateen Parekh. The two set out to reinvent radio by giving terrestrial broadcast stations the ability to crowdsource music, target advertising and provide an outlet for promotions and games. The Internet application provides terrestrial radio stations with a Google-like feel and experience. Run from a server sitting alongside the radio station's digital programming equipment in the broadcast studio, an Internet application allows listeners to take control of the music sent over the airwaves
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jelli.net

Crowdsourcing the brain

Waitt Family Foundation Project Develops Whole Brain Catalog free online resource aims to revolutionize neuroscience collaborations via a 3D high-resolution virtual catalog of the brain. LA JOLLA, Calif., Oct. 16 -- At the year's biggest international meeting of neuroscientists, researchers from the University of California, San Diego will unveil a tool that could revolutionize the way scientists and students explore and map the mysteries of the brain. Beginning Oct. 18, the team will demonstrate beta version 0.7 of the Whole Brain Catalog at Neuroscience 2009, the 39th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held this year in Chicago. The Whole Brain Catalog is a ground-breaking, open-source, 3D virtual environment that connects members of the international neuroscience community. Researchers at UC San Diego's Center for Research in Biological Systems (CRBS) have been developing the Catalog since 2008 with support from the Waitt Family Foundation. The goal of the Whole Brain Project: to pioneer brain research at the intersection of neuroscience, information technology, data management and scientific visualization. As the Project's flagship, the Whole Brain Catalog aims to accelerate resolving the mysteries of the brain while also facilitating solutions to today's intractable challenges in brain research through cooperation and "crowd-sourcing."
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Appswell Tests the Crowdsourcing Model for iPhone Apps

Last time I checked, there were 85,000 iPhone applications in Apple’s iTunes App Store, a number that seems to grow by thousands every week. But most of those apps were dreamed up by developers, not by average users. Now there’s a way for anyone with a bright idea for an iPhone app to submit it—and, if other people like the idea enough, to see it get made. It’s called Appswell, and it launched yesterday. The idea behind the Cambridge, MA-based startup, the brainchild of a young serial Web entrepreneur named Dan Sullivan, is to take advantage of the collective creativity of iPhone users to come up with the next great money-making app, and give everyone a chance to share in the proceeds. Anyone with an iPhone can submit an idea to Appswell or vote on other users’ ideas. Each month, the company will turn the most popular idea into an app, and reward the creator with a $1,000 cash prize and a stake in future sales.
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appswell.com

Neil Gaiman Crowdsourcing a Short Story Via Twitter

His means for penning his upcoming project are as creative as the gems in his copious portfolio, only he can't claim all the credit for this one. Starting today at noon EDT, the writer began encouraging people to tweet in their 140-character contributions for his next short story, which BBC Audiobooks America will later garner into an audio book. Gaiman (@neilhimself), who is already well established in the Twitter realm, will tweet the opening line and fans will be able to continue the story as they wish. BBC will log about 1,000 contributions into a script that will be edited and prepared to be read by a professional narrator. Currently there is no talk of releasing the story in print form, but the audio edition will be available for free download at the BBC site, iTunes and other audiobook distributors before the end of the year. BBC marketing director Michael Lee Cobb said the idea was inspired by Twitterdammerung: The Twitter Opera, a successfully fan-twittered composition that was performed at London's Royal Opera House last month.
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mousecircus.com/videotour

Google to crowdsource 3D cities

Google announced this morning yet another add-on to Google Earth called Building maker, a web tool which allows ordinary people to create in a few minutes 3D buildings for Google Earth. As explained by Google: “Basically, you pick a building and construct a model of it using aerial photos and simple 3D shapes – both of which we provide. When you're done, we take a look at your model. If it looks right, and if a better model doesn't already exist, we add it to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth.” Until now making a 3D building required the use of SketchUp, a free 3D software from Google, which, while less complex that other professional 3D software, was pretty difficult to use for non specialists. With this new tool Google can expect the number of cities mapped in 3D to grow exponentially.
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Crowdsourcing philanthropy -- do the masses know best?

Philanthropic efforts, when combined with the possibilities of the Internet, are producing interesting hybrids, and crowdsourcing ideas for development is one of them. The Peace Corps is testing such an approach with Africa Rural Connect (ARC), an online community where creativity and global collaboration are the goals, and the best ideas can win $20,000 in funding. See the current top 10 ideas here. Oct. 15 is the deadline for submitting projects for the current contest. Molly Mattessich now manages an online site to take global ideas and apply them to problems she saw firsthand as a volunteer. Anyone can submit an idea, endorse existing ideas and suggest improvements to them. Hosted by the National Peace Corps Association, the site connects over 200,000 current and returned Peace Corps volunteers, African Diaspora, non-profit leaders, technology buffs and anyone else who has a solution for Africa's development challenges.
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Trust art to crowdfund

Crowdfunding: Trust Art is a social platform that is commissioning ten public artworks over the next year. People are invited to become shareholders with $1, share with interested friends, and renew culture.
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Crowdfunding: Bitcents Launches 'Fully Functional' Micropayment System

NEW YORK Bitcents, a San Francisco and London-based technology startup, announced Wednesday the launch of what it's hailing as the first fully functional micropayment system for news organizations and consumers. Its micropayment platform allows publishers to charge on a per-story basis and set their own prices, which can vary according to the age or type of story. Then, bitcents will enable readers to purchase and view content across the Web using just one account. The developers of bitcents consider their product a platform for both news organizations and the general public. Papers looking to charge for content create subscriber networks using the bitcents technology, and users pay to join those networks. Subscribing to a network grants those users access to all of bitcents' partnering Web sites, and the subscriber network receives a portion of the revenue that they helped their partner organizations earn. Developers also can build tools to help their subscribing users to find and share content. News organizations joining the bitcents platform still keep their content discoverable through search engines like Google, which bitcents says won’t harm regular traffic to their sites. Many current paywall systems render a Web site's news unsearchable from outside sites.
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bitcents.com

Crowdsourcing: MySpace asks fans for help with ad campaign

LONDON - MySpace has become the latest brand to use crowdsourcing for an ad campaign, asking people to submit copy and images that will be broadcast on digital billboards in major cities around the globe. The three-week tie up, called 'Step Up to the Mic', is challenging MySpace members to share their thoughts on a dedicated page hosted by the social media website. Messages, which can up to 50 characters of text with an image, will be sent to Titan Outdoor to broadcast on its network of screens.
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Crowdsourcing digital signal strength

AT&T promises "more bars in more places" — but which places? Verizon Wireless proclaims "it's the network" — but does the network cover you well in the places you live, work and travel? Until now, cell phone users have had no detailed and impartial way to assess and compare which network offers the best data and voice service where they use their phones. Root Wireless Inc., a Bellevue, Wash., startup, aims to change that. Root's colorful online map, which debuted last week on CNET.com and is currently usable only by consumers living in the eight U.S. markets analyzed so far, shows voice and data signal strength for each of the four major U.S. carriers. An intriguing plan calls for building out map coverage through 200,000 volunteers nationwide, all armed with a data-gathering app on their smartphones.
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Crowdsourced Content and Sharing Activity in Spiceworks More than Doubles in Six Months to 775,000 members!

...crowdsourcing activity by its user community of 775,000 IT professionals has doubled over the past six months.

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Spiceworks™, Inc., provider of the first free social IT management application for small and medium businesses, today announced that crowdsourcing activity by its user community of 775,000 IT professionals has doubled over the past six months. To help support the increased sharing of IT information and best practices, Spiceworks also announced the addition of a new Spiceworks Extension Center, where IT professionals and MSPs can easily upload and access custom scripts that help automate common network and systems management tasks. The scripts library, IT discussions, product reviews, best practices and how-to’s can be accessed through the Spiceworks IT Desktop or in the Spiceworks community by visiting http://community.spiceworks.com/extensions.“By linking together the growing content, applications, and now scripts available in the Spiceworks Extension Center with our free IT management application, IT professionals and MSPs have a single place to access the information and tools they need to do their jobs,” said Scott Abel, co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks, Inc. “It’s a great example of the power of combining social networking and business applications to create the top resource for everything IT.”
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spiceworks.com

Google Crowdsources Google Maps, Erases Street View Data

Google took additional measures to let users crowdsource its Google Maps application, allowing U.S. users to point out gaps in the search engine giant's Google Maps coverage. When users search and scan map results, they will see a "report a problem" link on the bottom right of a the map. Google Maps' Street View also got a shot in the arm this week, rolling out to cover Canada and the Czech Republic. Google also agreed to permanently blur images on its internal database within one year of their publication on Street View.
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Rep. Honda embraces 'crowd-sourcing'

Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) launched what he calls the first crowd-sourced federal government website, designed to help citizens more easily reach and give advice and feedback to members of Congress. “Congress must take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies and transform the relationship between citizens and government,” Honda said. “Instead of viewing the public as a customer, I believe that we should empower citizens to become our partners in shaping the future of our nation.”
The site, http://honda.house.gov, showcases a design submitted by one of his constituents. Using a “crowd-sourced” model, Honda invited people to submit Web designs. The winner was chosen by constituents in his district. The crowd-sourcing concept is a key component to the Government 2.0 movement, which uses participatory websites to improve governing methods. Beth Noveck, a deputy chief technology officer in the White House, has used the same model to gather citizen input for how the government should become more transparent.
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honda.house.gov

Public Enemy crowdsources next record with Sellaband .com

Hip hop pioneers Public Enemy will partner with fan-funding site Sellaband to finance their next album. Public Enemy is one of the first established acts to sign up to Sellaband's new custom funding program and aims to raise $250,000 for the album in $25 increments. Public Enemy was incidentally also one of the first acts to release music on MP3. Amsterdam-based Sellaband allows artists to request support from fans, or in Sellaband parlance "Believers", who invest anything from $10 up in an album. Funding music this way is not for everyone but it does add a novel and badly-needed niche to the music business ecosystem. Sellaband's next challenge is to prove that fan-funding can work for artists at any stage of their career and that the model will transfer from Europe to the US. The Public Enemy announcement is an attempt to hit both of those birds with one stone.
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Crowdsourcing Unemployment Benefits at OpenCongress.org

A few weeks ago I wrote about the wonderful work a community of OpenCongress users is doing to research information about pending unemployment legislation. These users had banded together in the comment threads for these bills, and were organizing calls to Senators and Representatives while offering support to one another. This community formed in 2008, when an unemployment benefits extension was last before Congress. After (successfully) calling on lawmakers to approve that extension, they then set out to determine how each of the individual states would implement the 13-weeks of benefits payments approved by Congress. Unfortunately, the number of Americans joining the ranks of the unemployed is still growing. With the prospect of another round of Emergency Unemployment Compensation in the congressional pipeline, it's becoming more and more difficult for these individuals to determine just which benefits they're qualified to receive. BenefitWiki.orgWe're trying to make that easier with the new Benefit Wiki project here on OpenCongress.
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Outsourcing to the masses (update)

By Hugh Jordan. Wise mob. 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 bottom-up idea generation and peer-2-peer validation. 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 essentially a lack of 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.
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CreativeCrowds to Deliver Chaordix(TM) Crowdsourcing Solutions

Leading crowdsourcing agency in the Netherlands now offers advanced crowdsourcing platform. CALGARY, Alberta, Oct. 7, 2009 — With the rapid rise in adoption of crowdsourcing as a better way to innovate and understand consumers, CreativeCrowds, one of Europe’s leading agencies in the area of crowd-based innovation, is now partnering with Chaordix to design and deliver full-featured crowdsourcing platforms to European organizations. Chaordix helps organizations apply crowdsourcing to generate better ideas for new products or services, predict market reaction in advance, enhance their brand relevance in the market, engage crowd effort in solving problems, and much more. The Chaordix crowdsourcing platform guides and provides a rich, inviting environment that encourages incentive to participants to submit, refine and rank ideas, and make other contributions which result in bottom-line business value. The comprehensive and flexible Chaordix platform equips organizations to harness the “collective wisdom” of crowds from the broad public to consumers or internal stakeholders. “We’re seeing strong interest in crowdsourcing and open innovation from a wide variety of industries and government agencies here in Holland and in other areas in Europe,” said Carl Lens, CreativeCrowds Client Director. “More and more larger companies and organizations want a customized crowdsourcing site that delivers the flexibility and unique branding to fit their needs - Chaordix provides just that.”
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Crowdfunding: Putting Your Money Where Your Style Is

At a time when some of the fashion industry’s most beloved labels, from Christian Lacroix to Véronique Branquinho, are declaring bankruptcy, what would you pay to keep your favorite designer in business? A basic investment could be as little as £10, or $16, the price of a single share in the collection of a designer selling on CatwalkGenius.com. The startup Web site is using crowd funding, a financial model that relies on small investments from a large number of supporters to fund a project. But rather than a charitable donation, the site’s plan is to use the Internet’s social networks — and the enthusiasm of fashion fans — to raise capital in return for a share of the profits in individual collections.
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catwalkgenius.com

Will crowdsourcing save Hollywood?

The LA Times today states that the old business model of DVD driven sales to prop up Hollywood and A list stars is over. It was over a long time ago…Blockbuster is a graveyard moving over to the Red Box business model of vending machines at a $1.00 a disc. Red Box is a huge hit in America (suggest you kick the tyres…) watch people...as you leave the supermarket you grab a movie. And movie stars can’t save a bad movie! Netflix will last as long as people like DVDs in an envelope…and now Hollywood, as LA Times says it needs, a new business model. We propose crowdsourcing on a massive scale yet to be tried... If you haven’t seen the new Bruce Willis movie trailer for The Surrogates Please do.
Ask yourself, if you would invest in this movie after being shown this trailer. I would, based on the trailer as a member of the public I like it and will go and see it. With the executive shuffle in Hollywood executives need to reduce risk as the LATimes says Transformers 3 and Lego movies are a baby blanket for high risk poker players with $100 million budgets. But if it is the crowd who determines what gets made again ie the II after the movie usually means the first one made a profit. And if focus groups determine how a movie ends? Why not commit all the way to crowdsourcing in terms of financing a feature film, putting stars in it that make sense and roll the dice with the public’s involvement. Simon Cowell only makes records with the crowd’s vote and then sells the records back to the crowd, a threadless.com concept. Discuss…
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Corporate crowdsourcing and innovation's "dirty secret"

Remember that super idea you had last year for a new service that had real potential to make life easier for customers while boosting revenue for your company? Whatever happened to it? Was it properly aired and vetted within your organization, or did it end up like 99% of good ideas -- briefly tossed around in a conference room or email thread, before being forgotten and overtaken by new priorities?...That's where Imaginatik's Idea Central software comes in. It's a browser-based tool that lets companies leverage a much larger group of employees to internally crowdsource the tasks related to idea generation and better identify those ideas that have real potential. The software is already on version 9, and customers include Reed Elsevier, Chubb, Bombardier and Novartis. Imaginatik CEO Mark Turrell recently discussed Idea Central's positioning in the market for collaboration and project management software, plans for future expansion, and the "dirty secret" of idea management and innovation. (After the Q&A, you can watch a video of Turrell discussing innovation at last year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland).
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Crowdsourcing: New York City Wants You to Create an App For That

On Tuesday, New York City is rolling out the next phase of its NYC Big Apps competition, an initiative that will supply local programmers and developers with a stockpile of raw municipal data sets to build applications for the Web and mobile phones. Contestants will have access to more than 170 data sets supplied by over 30 city agencies, including weekly traffic updates, schedules of citywide events, property sales, restaurant inspections and mappable data around school and voting districts. “Crowdsourcing is a very hot topic in the Gov 2.0 space right now,” said Kristy Sundjaja, vice president of media, green, and emerging technology at the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which is co-sponsoring the competition.
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ANDYs Crowdsource Jury Selection

NEW YORK The International ANDY Awards is crowd sourcing its jury selection, said show co-chairs Ty Montague and Michael Lebowitz.Beginning today at electthejury.com, members of the global ad community can vote for and nominate potential jurors for the 2010 International ANDY Awards. "Our hope and our goal here is to bring in people with a greater diversity of both discipline and cultural background," said Montague, co-president and CCO of JWT North America "[And in doing so] that we get a more accurate, fair snapshot of what has been done in the past year." Big Spaceship CEO and founder Lebowitz added, "The composition of the jury is as important, or maybe more important, than the individuals on that list." The site features a selection of more than 120 potential jurors and also allows visitors to nominate others who are not already listed for the final jury of 25. Deadline for participation is November 15. "We believe in the wisdom of crowds," said Montague. "Hopefully, we will turn people up that we hadn't thought of as potential jury members."
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Crowdsourcing coming to iPhone apps, big time

If you've ever been driving down the highway and looked at the Google Maps application on an iPhone to see what traffic is like ahead, you may have wondered where the data behind the green, yellow, and red lines indicating real-time vehicle flow come from. In fact, the data are coming from people just like you: users of smartphones with GPS who, by the very act of driving down the highway, are feeding back information about how fast they're going to Google, which in turn is sending it back to users of its mobile map apps. Users of the Google Maps iPhone app can get real-time traffic flow data that is based on the passive participation of other users. This is an example of mobile crowdsourcing, something that is a growing trend, especially on iPhones.
Which means, of course, that the application itself is crowdsourced...
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List of Crowdsourcing or On-Demand Workforce Vendors

Useful information about emerging categories is often tough to come by. It’s typically fragmented across a variety of views and experts. My search for useful information about paid crowdsourcing technology vendors has been no exception. Several months ago, I published a list of crowdsourcing technology vendors. Within about a month, it had reached the number 1 position in natural search. It was a fairly rudimentary list, but apparently, it was the best current accumulation. For all those that have been searching for consolidated information for the on-demand workforce market, we’ve created two new sources for your consideration. We’ve greatly enhanced the existing list with more vendors and more vendor characteristics.
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Crowdsourcing in the House

How can you tell when crowdsourcing has hit the mainstream? When it’s featured on one of TV’s hottest shows. “House, M.D.” is about a doctor whose specialty is diagnosing unusual diseases. Each week’s episode features a patient presenting with unexplainable symptoms who requires tests and treatments until the diagnostic team finds the real disease. This week’s episode followed this pattern, but with one exception. Cue up crowdsourcing...When the patient doesn’t think he’s being treated quickly enough, he turns to crowdsourcing for his cure, offering $25,000 for anyone online who can correctly diagnose him.
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Crowdsourcing: Tap the crowd or join it for fun and profit

You don’t need to spend millions to benefit from crowdsourcing. Major companies have gained attention for "crowdsourcing" everything from a Super Bowl ad (Doritos) to improvements in movie recommendations (Netflix). Why pay an ad agency or employees, the thinking goes, if you can offer a prize and capitalize on the ambitions of amateurs and experts from around the world? But crowdsourcing doesn’t require millions of dollars, as a number of online companies are making it easier than ever for individuals, nonprofit groups and small businesses to participate in the crowdsourcing trend. "Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd," Jeff Howe wrote in "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," the Wired Magazine article that coined the term. "The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing." With crowdsourcing, you don’t hire an individual or a company when you need to provide customer-support answers or design a new corporate logo. Instead, you provide incentives — sometimes monetary, sometimes not — for people around the world to work on your project.
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