Imagine a future where you could take over the body of a robot from home and use it to do work at your office. Even better, when you finished your tasks, what if another remote employee could “beam in” to the same robot to get their tasks done? That’s not science fiction: It’s reality thanks to web-connected robots. Read more »
The future of work is already here. It is just already distributed, one might say. The freelance economy, microtasking, mobile workers, coworking spaces, crowdsourcing: All of these point to how work is increasingly shifting from the twentieth-century model of Taylorism (think scientific management applied to labor processes such as assembly-line production and fixed workplaces) to a more flexible, hyperspecialized and connected workforce. This report examines the new world of work, from the devices and software services we use to the growing role of social media, the importance of a group-centric mentality and how the roles of employees, managers and organizations are evolving. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Minted, a San Francisco-based stationery company was almost out of cash when its initial idea didn’t take off. A long shot bet on crowd sourcing has paid off and the company is now looking for growth in new markets. A $5.5-million infusion will surely help. Read more »
A new startup called CrowdControl is launching today, and it aims to bring order to the world of crowdsourcing by using artificial intelligence to judge workers’ accuracy. Think Amazon Mechanical Turk, only with a quality control mechanism in place to help ensure jobs get done right. Read more »
Many entrepreneurs are in the process of fundraising. However, many are unaware of the most favorable terms for raising money from investors and confused about what terms to focus on in a term sheet. Jay and Yusuf explain how to navigate these sometimes tricky waters. Read more »
Over the past few years, a lot has been made of “crowdsourcing” trends. It seem like everything — from graphic design and logos to funding — can be made better, faster, or cheaper thanks to crowd. But can crowdsourcing work for creative content? Read more »
After developing databases for Namibian non-governmental organizations while in the Peace Corps, Jay Haase moved back to Minnesota, moving the databases he created to the cloud and offering fractions of his time so the organizations could afford to keep him. Read more »
Wrike’s new release adds increased flexibility and speed to the project management software, which is designed to allow companies to crowdsource project management by taking advantage of the “work graph.” Read more »
Crowdfunding, fundraising by collecting relatively small amounts of money from many different people, has become quite popular in recent years. But Kickstarter is not the only startup churning out group funding success stories: San Francisco-based startup IndieGoGo is seeing its own form of crowdfunding success. Read more »
Smartling, a New York City-based start-up focused on enabling websites and apps to go multilingual, has raised $10 million to ramp up its localization tools. The company offers crowdsourcing tools for websites and apps to quickly and easily add additional language support. Read more »
Two months after it launched, British book crowdfunding website Unbound has only managed to push one project to the finishing line. So what’s wrong? Is donation-based publishing a dead end, or did the service misunderstand the reasons behind Kickstarter’s success? Read more »
The Internet and social networks such as Twitter are where many people go to research — or just talk about — medical issues. Can researchers discover any useful public-health information by looking at all this crowdsourced data? A new study from Johns Hopkins University suggests that they can. Read more »
Sequoia will be crowdsourcing its job application process through Talenthouse, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup that allows companies and artists to hold design contests for things like album art and logos. Sequoia isn’t an investor in Talenthouse– yet. Could this essentially be a public tire-kicking session? Read more »
LawPivot, a Google Ventures-funded legal Q&A startup targeting small companies, is broadening its reach by becoming part of Microsoft’s BizSpark program. As LawPivot continues to grow, it could help lead a movement toward true Knowledge as a Service. Read more »
New publishing startup Unbound is aiming to help authors raise money for new work directly from their fans. It’s a neat idea, but wil it really be enough to help it stand out in a crowdfunding market dominated by Kickstarter? Read more »
Social activity around books used to be limited to Oprah-style book clubs, but Jeff Howe — the author and journalism professor who coined the term “crowdsourcing” — wants to take that concept into the future by using Twitter to create the world’s largest virtual book-reading club. Read more »
Journalism professor Jay Rosen says one of the lessons he has learned in his career is that “the more people who participate in the press, the stronger it will be.” In other words, while “crowdsourcing” can produce plenty of noise, journalism is the better for it. Read more »
The crowdsourced approach to weather reporting used by new iPhone app Weddar means you’ll have an impression of how weather on the ground actually feels, instead of just static numbers. Weddar co-founder Ricardo Fonseca thinks the human connection is what’s missing from the mobile weather game. Read more »
If there’s one thing The Huffington Post does better than just about any other media entity, it’s take advantage of social media — and the site has just rolled out some new features that traditional publishers and media entities could learn some useful lessons from. Read more »
Demand Media says the latest changes to Google’s algorithm aren’t a big deal, even though they pushed its eHow unit down by as much as 65 percent, according to some estimates — but the reality is that Google is both Demand’s biggest partner and its biggest threat. Read more »
Professional cataloguers can be great if you want to index content — for professional cataloguers. But if you want to help average people find videos, then you should embrace user-contributed tags, even if they can contain spelling errors. Don’t worry, it still all makes sense to someone. Read more »
Asking questions and getting useful answers is the idea behind a new crop of community-assisted recommendation/Q&A apps that have appeared on the web and on mobile platforms. One entrant, Localmind, whose iPhone app is nearing launch, really shows off the promise of this new app category. Read more »
Earlier, I pointed out an emerging recent trend in apps: community-assisted recommendations. Recently, I got a chance to talk with the CEO behind one of these apps, Crowdbeacon, which provides location-based recommendations and answers to questions sourced by the app’s user community. Read more »
Asking thousands of strangers if those jeans look good on you might not have seemed possible only a few short years ago, but now it’s only an app download away, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg for the new trend of community-assisted decision making. Read more »
Silicon Valley startup Law Pivot is introducing a new recommendation feature for its Quora-like Q&A services that aims to democratize access to quality legal advice. Even before today’s news, though, Law Pivot has defied the odds by gaining traction in a notoriously technology-resistant profession. Read more »
New York City has launched a “crowdsourcing” effort aimed at getting ideas from city employees to help the city function more efficiently. The program, called Simplicity, is being powered by Spigit, which makes a software platform that companies and governments can use to crowdsource ideas. Read more »
Q&A site Quora is lately being called the savior of search and the next Facebook. But is Quora worth all the fuss? But the company is far from alone in the Q&A space, and so the question arises, is Quora really worth all its hype? Read more »
As crowdsourcing goes mainstream, there’s a heated debate going on about whether the practice commoditizes expertise. Having built an expert crowdsourcing site for the past year, I’m convinced these services don’t have to commoditize expertise. Quite the opposite, I think they can give it direct value. 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 »
NewsTrust, a non-profit startup aimed at improving the credibility of media, ran a week-long project called Truthsquad earlier this year that crowdsourced fact-checking of political statements, and founder Fabrice Florin says while the effort was a success, it was also a lot of work. Read more »
Crowdsourcing is often used for fairly menial tasks: correcting databases, screening offensive images, transcribing audio. But what if you could make those little bits of human labor even more menial, discrete and interchangeable? That’s what the Finnish company Microtask does. Read more »
Minted.com, a San Francisco-based online stationary seller has found enough success with the crowd sourcing model to think about expanding into new markets. The company has hired veteran Google engineer as its CTO to beef up its infrastructure it needs for its grand ambitions. Read more »
A recent LA Times profile of “Chief TWiT” Leo Laporte reveals how much fun Laporte seems to be having as a professional podcaster — and also reveals that TWiT may make up to $3 million in revenue in 2010, thanks in part to crowdsourcing. Read more »
Two weeks after the independently-produced Pioneer One‘s premiere, it’s become the most-seeded show on BitTorrent while also raising over $20,000 from fans for production of the next three episodes. But should the show’s producers seek out a steady source of funding — or stick to crowdsourcing? Read more »
The White House wants to hear from average citizens with big ideas about what projects the government should tackle, and has asked them to respond on Twitter. The responses are being collected by Expert Labs, a non-profit run by former Six Apart executive Anil Dash. Read more »
We’re kicking off a new video series in which we talk to startups and entrepreneurs with a unique view of technology and its impact. Our first conversation is with Lukas Biewald, co-founder of crowd-sourcing labor platform, CrowdFlower, which aims to redefine the future of work. Read more »
Wikileaks, the non-profit web site devoted to exposing government and corporate secrets, says that it has raised enough money to continue operating, but not enough to pay its staff. The site suspended operations recently to try and raise enough funds to continue publishing. Read more »
Wikileaks, the crusading non-profit web service that exposes government secrets and corporate corruption by publicizing secret documents, says it has been forced to suspend operations while it looks for financing. The site says that it needs between $200,000 and $600,000 to continue operating. Read more »
Programmers can compete with journalists if they like, but they’d be wise to instead arm journalists with the power of their programming. Reporters and editors shouldn’t need to know how to code web apps any more than they should know how to create word processing apps ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Last month saw the launch of CrowdFlower, an interesting venture that applies Dolores Labs’ Labor-as-a-Service platform to the non-profit “micro employment” foundation Samasource. We’ve previously covered web-based labor and outsourcing services — notably Shorttask and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk — that match-make workers and tasks, and I’ve […] Read more »
