MindTouch Promises Safe Crowdsourcing for Product Documentation

MindTouch Sept. 1 released a packaged solution to help companies open their product and company documentation to contribution from outside users while protecting companies from spam and other security threats. A sort of Wikipedia for enterprises, the MindTouch Collaborative Knowledge Base lets businesses allow customers or partners with little or no technical savvy to co-edit reference guides, tutorials, FAQs, files, images or videos. The wiki environment, based on the MindTouch 2009 open-source collaboration platform, includes controls for editors to accept and reject contributions, along with word blacklist, video editing, and user or IP blocking and banning.
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TCL Crowdsourcing Brings On-Demand Web and Application Testing to the UK

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

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