G.E. announced a partnership with Quirky, a New York-based start-up that is a kind of social network for inventors, helping turn vague ideas into marketable items, manufacturing them, and distributing them through stores like Best Buy and Target. G.E. is licensing hundreds of its patents to the company’s community and working directly to help identify particularly promising consumer uses of these patents.
Mapathon 2013 — which starts on February 12 and culminates on March 25, 2013 — is an India-wide mapping contest open to just about anybody who lives in India. We’re inviting Google Maps users from all over the country to help us create better maps for India by adding knowledge of their neighborhoods through Google Map Maker
Chinese-language outsourcing/crowdsourcing service Zhubajie, which uses a similar model as Elance.com’s, claims to have 7.6 million workers. If this is true, it would mean that Zhubajie, despite having a cartoon pig as its mascot, is the largest online outsourcing/crowdsourcing site in the world by some margin, having more “workers” than Freelancer.com (6.5 million users) and Elance.com (2 million users) combined. Zhubajie’s might even be the largest employer in the world, as it has more workers than the U.S. Department of Defense, which has 3.2 million employees
a crime reporter at The Mercury in Pottstown started a “Wanted by Police” gallery (on Pinterest) The results have been astounding.
“We’ve actually seen a 57 percent increase in our warrant services, and we actually got more people based on our tips and our calls,” Richard Drumheller, Captain at the Pottstown Police Department, told NPR.
In 2008, it could take six to 18 months for Google to update a map. The company would have to go back to the firm that provided its map information and get them to check the error, correct it and send it back. “At that point we decided we wanted to bring that information in house,” says McClendon. Google now updates its maps hundreds of times a day. Anyone can correct errors with roads signs or add missing roads and other details; Google double checks and relies on other users to spot mistakes.
Thousands of people use Google’s Map Maker daily to recreate their world online, says Michael Weiss-Malik, engineering director at Google Maps. “We have some Pakistanis living in the UK who have basically built the whole map,” he says. Using aerial shots and local information, people have created the most detailed, and certainly most up-to-date, maps of cities like Karachi that have probably ever existed.
For the first time in the history of homebuilding, a development company has decided to crowdsource the construction process. As France explains, every house on the Ladera lot will draw a certain semblance of inspiration from designs the company found on Pinterest.
Cancer Research UK has launched an online interactive database of cancerous cell samples and is inviting the public to help lab researchers investigate the two million images… Each sample in the database has been stained to highlight the differences between ordinary cells, such as white blood cells, and irregular, cancerous cells
A traveler goes to Flightfox.com and sets up a competition, supplying information about the desired itinerary and clarifying a few preferences, like a willingness to “fly on any airline to save money” or a tolerance of “long layovers to save money.” Once Flightfox posts the contest, the crowd is invited to go to work and submit fares.
The contest runs three days, and the winner, the person who finds the lowest fare, gets 75 percent of the finder’s fee that the traveler pays Flightfox when setting up the competition
A note to all you poor souls designing crowd-sourced marketing campaigns for large corporations: 4chan exists (via Mountain Dew Naming Campaign Hijacked By Infamous Message Board 4Chan)
The Colorado shooting and the crowdsourced future of news — Tech News and Analysis
Although other sites put up Storify collections of tweets from individuals who were at the scene — including one of the victims — as a way of tracking how the news spread, the community of users at Reddit went a step further: they collaborated in real time to produce a continuously updated timeline of the event, complete with links to where they obtained the information. That kind of collaboration is something many cash-strapped newsrooms simply no longer have the resources to produce
advertising is 20 percent idea and 80 percent execution. It’s knowing what ideas are going to be great. It’s knowing how to make those ideas. I always love that great quote, ‘We’re all artists, it’s just that some of us shouldn’t exhibit.’ Just because everybody can do it isn’t to say they should. I get very annoyed when people say to me, ‘We can crowdsource!’ No, we can’t. Anybody can do it? No! I don’t think they can. Everybody can dance, everybody can sing, everybody can play tennis, everybody can kick a football: Are they any good at it? No, not necessarily. I went to art school. I trained, I tried, I had to work at it. I think the idea that you can just pick up a pencil and do it is nonsense. — John Hegarty
Milk.ly
apparently this is like a London based version of Taskrabbit. I have been waiting for this for a while. Of course, whether they’ll have people in my neck of the woods is another question, but I can dream… :-)
the Adopt-A-Hydrant program, a first-of-its-kind effort, where residents can volunteer to keep hydrants in their neighborhood accessible to firefighters after snowstorms. By keeping hydrants free of snow, volunteers will help firefighters respond to a fire emergency more quickly, when every second counts. Last year, the Department responded to 5,653 fires.
To adopt one of Boston’s 13,000+ public hydrants, go to http://boston.adoptahydrant.org.
Twitter-sourcing is the laziest form of research. It’s like going to the library, lying down on the floor, and asking relevant books to jump off the shelves onto your face
