Apple and its developers are announcing a lot of apps being retooled for its new smart watch, launching next week, but one…
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Devicescape offers a Wi-Fi fallback service to mobile carriers
Devicescape has long offered a crowdsourced network of hotspots to carriers that have adopted a “Wi-Fi first” attitude, which aims to move…
Read MoreCome see August, Electric Imp and more at our SXSW Hardware House
No matter what you think about South by Southwest Interactive, tens of thousands of people still head to Austin, Texas in the…
Read MoreBrown Moses launches crowdsourced tracking of troops in Ukraine
Eliot Higgins, the investigative blogger also known as Brown Moses, has launched a new project that uses crowdsourced data to track Ukrainian and Russian troop and vehicle movements in real time…
Read MoreGuardian digital editor is right — ending comments is a mistake
Guardian digital editor and former New York Times staffer Aron Pilhofer says media outlets are making a monumental mistake by ending comments, instead of focusing on how they can use them to build a true community and two-way relationship with their readers…
Read MoreMoovit, the Waze of public transit, rakes in another $50M
The meteoric rise of Waze was a huge success story for the Israeli tech scene, and the country is now aiming to…
Read MoreGenius wants to be like Wikipedia, but for the entire internet
The news that New Yorker music writer Sasha Frere-Jones has joined the crowdsourced annotation site Genius has highlighted the ambitions of the service, which wants to help experts edit the entire internet…
Read MoreThe year in media: 12 reasons why we should be optimistic
It's easy to focus on the negatives in media -- the mistakes, the downsizing at traditional journalistic outlets, etc. -- but there were plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the media landscape this year, and here are just a few of them…
Read MorePlatforms and crowdsourcing: The office of the 21st century
“Disruption” is one of the most overhyped concepts of the last ten years. A Google Trend search for “disruptive innovation” shows a steeply…
Read MoreCitizen journalism and vigilantism are two sides of the same coin
It's easy to see the downside of citizen journalism when right-wing bloggers attack rape victims, but those same tools have also been used to expose government secrets and reveal crucial information about dictatorships and terrorist groups…
Read MoreThe New York Times open-sources its Hive crowdsourcing platform
The New York Times built an in-house crowdsourcing platform called Hive so that readers could help it identify old print ads -- and now the paper has open-sourced the software that runs that platform so anyone can use it…
Read MoreWhy I’m interested in First Look’s new social-journalism project
As I reported earlier today, First Look Media editor Andy Carvin — formerly of National Public Radio — has just launched a…
Read MoreBloomSky wants to turn schools into storm tracking stations
Science teachers wanting to teach their students about the changing ways of weather soon could find themselves with an interesting teaching aid. Crowdsourced weather startup BloomSky plans to give away 10,000 internet-connected weather probes to schools and parks…
Read MoreNews Deeply adds another topic-specific site to its network by launching Ebola Deeply
News Deeply, a network of topic-specific sites founded by former ABC News foreign correspondent Lara Setrakian, has just launched its latest addition: Ebola Deeply, a site dedicated to coverage of the disease and its impact on society…
Read MoreNYT asks readers to help identify print ads, using a platform for crowdsourcing called Hive
The New York Times' research and development lab has launched a new project asking readers for help in identifying old advertisements from its print archive -- and the project is the first to be built on a new open-source platform for crowdsourcing called Hive…
Read MoreWeatherSignal starts tracking pressure on iOS using the iPhone 6’s barometer
Weather tracking isn't just Android owners any more. OpenSignal has made its crowdsourced climate-monitoring app available on iOS though only iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users can take measurements.…
Read MoreAmazon’s crowdsourced publishing platform will launch soon for mystery, romance and sci-fi authors
Amazon's crowdsourced publishing initiative is for romance, mystery/thriller and sci-fi/fantasy authors, and will open to the public in a couple of weeks. Separately, Amazon is launching a community called WriteOn.…
Read MoreTwitter users crowdsource the identification of suspects in Philadelphia hate crime
The speed with which several otherwise unconnected Twitter users -- on different sides of the country -- managed to identify the suspects in a brutal attack on two gay men in Philadelphia shows the power of the network effects in social platforms like Twitter and Facebook…
Read MoreCrowdFlower raises $12.5M to deliver better data for better models
Crowdsourcing startup CrowdFlower has raised another $12.5 million as it tries to make life better for the data science community. As people try to get better, faster data to power their predictive models, CrowdFlower's API-focused approach is proving pretty popular.…
Read MoreCrowd-powered journalism becomes crucial when traditional media is unwilling or unable
A protest in Ferguson, Missouri that escalated into a violent siege by anti-riot troops was another illustration of how valuable a citizen-powered form of media using Twitter and other social platforms can be, especially as a check on administrative power…
Read MoreFon begins beta testing a business Wi-Fi network
Fon hopes to expand beyond its residential hotspots into coffee shops, retail stores and dentist offices across the world. It's launching a new beta program and Fonera router for businesses starting today.…
Read MoreDealing with the Twitter mob: Would crowdsourcing block lists make things better or worse?
What if Twitter users could collaborate on deciding which trolls should be blocked or muted on the service -- would that help cut down on abuse, or would it solve one problem while creating another?…
Read MoreWant to raise venture capital for your hardware idea? Start with Kickstarter
Building hardware is hard. So is raising venture capital. So which of the two big crowdfunding sites offer an entrepreneur the best chance at both?…
Read MoreWi-Fi hotspot speeds are still faster than 4G in the U.S., but that could soon change
While it might seem like common sense that Wi-Fi would outpace LTE, the opposite is actually true in many countries. U.S. LTE speeds are slow, according to OpenSignal, but they are starting to get faster.…
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