Crowd labor is outsourced information work that can be provisioned automatically. It’s ideally, inexpensive, on demand, and elastic. Platforms providing such services are on the rise in 2012, promising customers lower labor costs in the short term and higher-quality output in the long term. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Rap Genius, a site that lets people crowdsource explanations to song lyrics and other kinds of text, has received $15 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. Read more »
New York-based social product design startup Quirky is launching its first product vertical around Apple and is partnering with design shopping site Fab to bring a line of community-created iPhone 5 accessories to market. Read more »
Since its launch in 2009, Food52 has become a premier destination for community-vetted recipes online, but its founders Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs have grown even more ambitious. They want to build a crowdsourced clearinghouse of culinary knowledge that cooks can access anywhere on the Web. Read more »
Kickstarter, the fund-raising engine for an increasing number of creative projects, is poised to have a breakout winter as a film funder, with three of its projects on documentary short lists for the Academy Awards and more than a dozen films headed to Sundance. Read more »
A few weeks ago I wrote about what crowdsourcing is useful for, breaking it down into three main categories: Work, Input and Organizing. Here are some ideas for tasks that can be crowdsourced and links to sites that can help you with those tasks. Read more »
