As more and more breaking news comes to us through social media, the task of determining what is true and what isn’t becomes exponentially harder. Storyful says that crowdsourcing is the best way to do this, and so it has opened up its professional verification process. Read more »
Critics of a Newsweek cover story by historian Niall Ferguson say the piece should never have been published because of the errors and flawed logic it contains. But isn’t it better if those kinds of mistakes are corrected in public view instead of behind closed doors? Read more »
Twitter says its Clockwork Raven web app will make it easier for even non-technical people to post job requests to Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing job site. The app is now available for download from Github. Read more »
Home cooks are using digital tools to help them cook: smartphones, video streaming, cooking apps and social media sites, according to an Allrecipes.com poll. But our increased dependence on the internet for cooking advice is also destroying our faith in the recipe itself. Read more »
Author tours have never been a guaranteed way to sell books, so many publishers have cut back on them. Togather, a new Brooklyn-based startup, hopes it can reinvent the author tour by guaranteeing that a certain number of books will be sold in advance. Read more at paidContent »
Netflix wants your help – and we are not talking about its troubled stock: The company is looking for volunteers to join its crowdsourced subtitling community. It’s all just an experiment for now, but it could one day become a massively crowdsourced closed captioning operation. Read more »
Cloud computing and open source software have freed IT practitioners from so much legacy vendor baggage over the past few years. Isn’t it time to free them from inane benchmark boasting, too? A crowdsourced platform where users share their real-world performance experiences could help. Read more »
As newspapers continue to lay off staff, one question is what will help to fill the gap that is left — where will that journalism come from? We’ve seen signs this week of one partial answer: amateur journalists making use of social media. Read more »
The way that communities like Reddit can come together to produce real-time reporting on incidents like the mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater shows how a new form of journalism — one that blends traditional reporting and crowdsourced reports — is starting to take shape. Read more »
The Silicon Strip is coming along nicely, and although they’re mostly young and relatively unknown, Las Vegas’s startups aren’t hurting for good ideas. Some are even growing beyond their wildest dreams. Here are five of the city’s most-promising. Read more »
Journatic, a local-journalism aggregation startup that used to provide content to newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, has been criticized for a series of ethical lapses. But that doesn’t mean the kind of outsourcing it represents isn’t part of the future of journalism. Read more »
When Republic Wireless launched last November it promised to deliver reams of data, voice, and SMS to its customers using a hybrid cellular-Wi-Fi network model. That Wi-Fi has to come from somewhere, and now we know the source: Devicescape. Read more »
The arrival of the iPhone five years ago changed many things, but one of the most fundamental was the way that news and journalism are delivered and consumed — and at the same time, it also revolutionized the way that news content is created. Read more »
Jim Fowler, who sold his crowd-sourced business contact data company Jigsaw to Salesforce for $175 million in 2010, is back and he’s applying a crowd-sourced model to competitive intelligence, using a team of freelance researchers to build business reports on private companies. Read more »
France’s Bouygues Telecom is working with virtual hotspot network Devicescape to give its smartphone customers seamless access to 8 million open Wi-Fi access points globally, replicating – at least fractionally – one of the key differentiators Iliad’s Free Mobile has on the competition: a 4 million-node offload network. Read more »
In a move to expand its utility beyond simply finding better answers to known statistical problems, hot data-science startup Kaggle is now letting its stable of expert data scientists compete to tell companies how they can improve their businesses using machine learning. Read more »
Intel is adding a feature to its Ultrabooks and tablets that will make them stand out from its competitors’ netbooks and slates: automatic access to a global Wi-Fi network. The silicon vendor is using DeviceScape’s connection manager technology to link to millions of open hotspots. Read more »
In a discussion about his use of Twitter as a reporting tool, NPR strategist Andy Carvin made some interesting points about the value of crowdsourced journalism — including the importance of being transparent about the process, and the virtues of being human. Read more »
The cult of Kickstarter and the looming promise of the JOBS Act, have presented an opportunity that Fundable wants to fill. The service, which is part of Virtucon Ventures debuted today with five projects and a goal of helping entrepreneurs raise capital for their businesses. Read more »
Kickstarter is not just a startup– it’s part of an important shift away from the industrial manufacturing era & toward the maker economy. In this wide-ranging interview, founder Perry Chen talks about how society is reaching a new ‘bursting point of creativity,’ & where Kickstarter goes from here. Read more »
The quantified-self movement is a community of individuals deploying mobile health applications, fitness trackers and social media platforms to share information on their health behaviors. It’s an important movement to watch, as its growth has huge potential implications for the health care sector’s future evolution. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The $50-million funding round that Quora recently closed has raised some eyebrows. Is this just another example of a bubble-style atmosphere in Silicon Valley’s venture capital community, or is the crowdsourced question-and-answer site really onto something that could be a multibillion-dollar idea? Read more »
Stationery startup Minted, which crowdsources designs for wedding invitations, holiday cards and other correspondence, is now selling crowdsourced art prints. It is also adding Pinterest-like curation boards. Read more at paidContent »
Is the web run by large corporations, or is it powered primarily by peer-to-peer networks? That’s the question behind one of the longest-running wagers of the modern web era — a six-year-old bet between author and web sceptic Nick Carr and Harvard professor Yochai Benkler. 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 »
In his quest to map the connections in the brain, MIT professor Sebastian Seung is turning citizen science into a game. In this video, he talks about his project, Eyewire, and how prior experience with coloring books is all you need to play. Read more »
Tech giants may have their own views on what journalism should become, but some news organisations are questioning what benefits the social vision of future news can really bring at a time when they’re struggling for business survival… Read more at paidContent »
It’s tempting to get nostalgic about the disappearance of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition after two centuries, but as we have found with journalism, knowledge building of all kinds gets better when there are more people involved. It may be chaotic, but the result is superior. Read more »
In contrast to the wave of support for paywalls that is sweeping the newspaper industry, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger says that he remains committed to practicing “open journalism,” an approach he believes is the only real option for media in the digital era. Read more »
In an attempt to come up with better laws on copyright, Reddit is crowdsourcing the creation of a Free Internet Act, while Public Knowledge is trying to introduce its own alternatives. But will crowdsourcing work, or will it just add to the chaos and confusion? Read more »
CrowdControl, which launched in November with the goal of improving the accuracy of crowdsourcing projects by analyzing results against a set of artificial intelligence techniques, has raised $2 million from Greycroft Partners and RTP Ventures. Read more »
Yelp announced pricing of its planned IPO, with plans to sell 7.15 million shares at $12 to $14 a share. But the important thing is that Yelp has shown there is a real business to be made out of building and growing a community of users. Read more »
Add Amazon Studios to the list of online video providers that could soon release some new original programming. The company is looking to hire creative executives to develop and produce original comedies and kids shows for online and traditional distribution. Read more »
For the first time, not one but two Kickstarter projects eclipsed the $1 million pledge mark, within hours of each other yesterday. The milestones highlight the bigger momentum behind Kickstarter, which is rounding into form as a major funding tool. Read more »
Snazzy logos aren’t just for corporations anymore. Occupy.com, the soon-to-be-launched website for the international Occupy protest movement, has turned to crowdsourced design website 99Designs to find a logo. The “Occupy 99Designs” design contest has garnered nearly 400 entries in its first few hours online. Read more »
Hilton Head is an island full of sandy beaches, manicured golf courses and lush green trees. But one thing the island community doesn’t have is good cellular coverage. By working with RootMetrics to crowdsource testing of its local cellular networks, it hopes to change that. Read more »
LuxeYard, a site selling high-end home decor products, is launching Tuesday. Yes, it’s technically another flash sales site. But what’s interesting about LuxeYard is that it’s doing things a bit differently from the established players in the space such as One Kings Lane and Gilt Groupe. Read more »
Chegg, a Santa Clara, Calif.–based startup that made its name in textbook rentals, has made its first piece of software that it says will aid the transition to digital learning for students by offering e-textbooks that act an awful lot like physical textbooks. Read more »
Hulu is launching its first original scripted show just days before Netflix will unveil its first stab at an original TV show. Both companies are part of a bigger movement toward original online programming that includes new ways of funding as well as distribution. 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 »
