NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen says that many of the cultural barriers to doing “networked journalism” have been lowered, and he is trying to help media outlets develop smart tools and ways of making use of crowdsourcing. Read more at paidContent »
Open Garden hopes to make Google Glass — and any wearable computer — a node on its growing crowdsourced mesh network, and it’s asking for Google’s help to make it happen. Read more »
While much of the attention during and after the Boston bombings focused on how one Reddit thread got things wrong, there were other important parts of the community that were doing good — and even doing something approaching journalism. Read more at paidContent »
While both Twitter and Reddit have come under fire for distributing incorrect information about the Boston bombings, mainstream outlets have done so as well. In a real-time news environment, having more sources is ultimately better. Read more at paidContent »
Vasu Kulkarni isn’t an NBA star; he couldn’t even make an Ivy League basketball team. But Kulkarni’s startup Krossover is trying to change the nature of coaching, scouting and even fandom by testing people’s on-the-field sports intelligence. Read more »
Thanks to OpenSignal’s crowdsourced testing app, we’re getting an early preview of where T-Mobile’s LTE will go live: Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, New Orleans, New York City, San Diego, Seattle and the Bay Area. Read more »
Harvard recently threw a tough genomics problem to TopCoder’s crowdsourced community and discovered the contest not only revealed a much broader field of investigation but provided a high level of motivation to get the problem solved. Read more »
Grafetee, which makes it extremely easy to collect and display location-based data, is now offering more customizable, API-driven services to paying users, from bloggers to local authorities. Read more »
New RootMetrics tests shows that AT&T’s LTE networks are on average 4.3 Mbps faster than Verizon’s when downloading data. What Verizon lacks in speed, though, it makes up for in coverage. Read more »
Is picking Twitter accounts to follow the same as picking which cable television host to trust? Journalists who’ve reported from the Middle East and relied on Twitter to receive their news say maybe. Read more »
Open Garden is now supporting multi-hop mesh networking in its app. That means your devices won’t just share connectivity with each other but with your neighbors’ devices and with their neighbors’ devices as well. Read more »
Optimizing content is crucial as customers migrate from being passive recipients to becoming active contributors. This opportunity presents a fresh set of challenges, not only for those in traditional broadcast industries but also for content managers and enterprise leaders. Read more »
The U.S. may have the most developed LTE infrastructure of any country in the world, but it’s networks are no means the fastest. Seven other countries scored higher in an OpenSignal study of 4G speeds. Read more »
Deutsche Telekom is considering investing in Fon, the crowdsourced Wi-Fi provider. Though the deal is far from certain, DT could benefit greatly from a close relationship with Fon’s millions-strong Wi-Fi community. Read more »
Open Garden needs scale, TextMe needs a means for its customers to reach the Internet. These two might just be a match made in heaven. Read more »
Swedish DJ and producer Avicii has agreed to work with network builder Ericsson to experiment with a crowdsourced music composition on. Starting on Wednesday, the public will be able to submit audio tracks that could wind up in Avicii’s new single. Read more »
A group of researchers from an Israeli university used data from Waze to determine the country’s most-accident-prone areas and how they correlate, or not, with a notable police presence. It’s just one of many efforts using ballooning data from drivers and devices to try and make sense of city traffic. Read more »
Moovit is trying to be the Waze of public transit by offering a crowd-sourced transportation app for bus and train commuters. The system hopes to provide more accurate estimated time of arrivals and better updates on upcoming travel conditions. Read more »
Crowdsourcing is a great idea in theory, but it hasn’t really lived up to its potential, says Alegion CEO Nathaniel Gates. He thinks with some fundamental tweaks, Alegion can change all that for the better. Read more »
Everywhere you look, there’s another option for sharing your medical data in the name of the greater good. These efforts are not for nothing: Because of there scale and geographic reach, crowdsourced data banks have the potential to revolutionze how medical research is conducted. Read more »
BillGuard, a crowd-sourced financial protection service that flags suspicious activity for consumers, is taking its services to mobile wallet app Lemon, which has 2.5 million users on iOS and Android. Now, Lemon users can check their balance on stored cards, see recent transactions and suspicious activity. Read more »
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 »
Critics of social media like to focus on how much fake news gets circulated during events like Hurricane Sandy, but Twitter and other services are also quick to correct those kinds of reports, and have become part of an expanding ecosystem of real-time news. Read more »
It’s one thing to try crowdsourced legislation in relatively small, cohesive societies such as those in Finland and Iceland, but a whole different ballgame when you try it on a population of half a billion people. Read more »
InfoArmy, a startup that creates crowd-sourced competitive intelligence reports for the iPad, has raised $17.3 million from Norwest Venture partners and Trinity Ventures. InfoArmy was founded Jim Fowler, who sold his previous startup Jigsaw to Salesforce for $175. Read more »
Iceland’s citizens were given a chance to help forge a new constitution for their country through Facebook and Twitter, so it’s not surprising that they backed the resulting draft. Now it’s over to the politicians. Read more »
NASA and a couple other government agencies have kicked off a series of TopCoder challenges designed to find innovative solutions to the government’s big data problems. The first contest is all about making disparate, incompatible data sets usable and actually valuable across agencies. Read more »
Are you lost for words when dealing with the inner workings of common household appliances? Then you might want to check out FixYa’s new iPhone app, which gives users the option to record their problems in video, so they don’t have to write about “that thing.” Read more »
I was an AirBnB sceptic for a long time, but trying the service made me realize just how disruptive it could be — and how it also shares a lot of the same characteristics of other disruptive businesses that are powered by the social web. Read more »
Nokia Research Center has developed a new system for finding parking spots that rewards users for sharing information on primo spots. It’s a smart approach to a common problem, as users might be more willing to share if they know they’ll get privileged information in return. Read more »
The Finnish government has approved the technology behind a new ‘Open Ministry’ platform, which will act as a hub for citizens who want new laws voted on in the country’s parliament. But could that work elsewhere? Read more »
There may be light at the end of the tunnel for America’s beleaguered patent system thanks to a new partnership between the patent office and expert Q&A site Stack Exchange. The new system, which goes live this morning, invites members of the public to submit prior art. Read more »
Knock me down with a feather! After a week of sometimes not-so-civil discourse, alt-rock icon Amanda Palmer says she’s started paying the artists who volunteered to back up her band on its “Theatre is Evil” tour. Read more »
Duolingo, a language learning and crowdsourced translation platform from Recaptcha founder Luis von Ahn, has raised $15 million in Series B funding from New Enterprise Associates and Union Square Ventures. Read more »
Despite all the gloom in the newspaper business, which he says will likely still have to suffer more pain and possible bankruptcies, New York Times media writer David Carr says he believes that thanks to the internet we are living in a “golden age for journalism.” Read more »
Amanda Palmer, an alt rock fan favorite who’s worked Kickstarter and social media masterfully in her career, may have mis-stepped when she posted a plea for free musicians to back up her band in its current tour. Or else it was a publicity stunt. Read more »
TaskRabbit is one of the most talked about distributed and freelance workforce startups. While most people use taskrabbits for getting groceries or doing minor tasks, some startups are finding that TaskRabbit is good source for finding researchers and staff up consumer panels instantly. Read more »
New York-based Quirky, a startup that enables a worldwide community of inventors to collaboratively create products, has raised $68 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Norwest Venture Partners and RRE Ventures. Read more »
It is always fun to watch successful founders come back into the startup arena again. Joshua Schachter, who created the social-bookmarking service Delicious, is back with Tasty Labs and today released Human.io, a platform for micro-task collaboration. It seems like a good platform for creatives. Read more »
Reddit landed a personal appearance by the President of the United States on Wednesday when Barack Obama stopped by for one of the site’s “Ask Me Anything” interviews — an event that further adds to the web community’s reputation as an alternative source of journalism. Read more »
