Today, Koozoo officially launched its broadcasting network that crowdsources smartphone videos from public places. Users can post and view footage from places like coffee shops, clothing stores, parks, and world landmarks. Whether you are looking to assess how crowded a concert is or want to check out what’s happening in Times Square, the company’s goal is to make “live views of the world’s public spaces easily accessible to all.”

“Koozoo will usher in a new era that reads like science fiction today,” said Trevor Darrell, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement. “For example, within a few years I expect Koozoo to let you take a virtual walk down the street in Tokyo or Paris in 3D, live, as you sit comfortably at home in California.”

Back in December, Koozoo announced its $2.5 million seed round led by New Enterprise Associates and Tugboat Ventures to prepare the platform for mainstream adoption. The app is available on iOS and Android. Koozoo is free for basic members and will be available today in San Francisco and Austin.

Photo Credit: Besty Weber/Flickr

SPARCIN debuts today to “create better interviews.” The software opens up a crowdsourced question pool in which members of the community can submit and rate interview questions.

“Interviewing is traditionally a pretty terrible experience. It’s awkward and intimidating for the interviewers and even more so for the candidate” said founder Patrick Hutchinson in an email. “What we’re doing is creating positive experience for both the interviewer and candidate so that at the end of it all, the interviewer is able to make an informed devision about the candidate.”

Interviews are an opportunity for employers and recruiters to dig a little deeper into an applicants experience and judge whether there is a personality match.

By contributing questions, employees not normally involved have the chance to participate. The more they participate, the more of a role they play in supporting the company’s interviews. Contributors can also vote for other people’s questions to promote the queries they think are important.

SPARCIN currently has thousands of questions across hundreds of content-specific categories. The Interview Builder tool finds the highest scoring questions that meet specific needs (category, difficulty, and so on), and the Live Builder feature displays those questions along with possible answers and tips to the interviewer to keep the momentum flowing. After the interview is over, it has tools to aggregate and quantify the results to help recruiters with the next step.

While many recruiting and interviewing products are on the market — like Hirelogy, which provides questions for interviewers, or video-interviewing service HireVue — SPARCIN distinguishes itself by focusing on crowdsourcing.

SPARCIN is the second product crafted by SPARC, a web development shop in Charleston, S.C. Hutchinson was spending significant amounts of time growing SPARC’s team from two to 175 and realized the interview process was not as effective as it could be. In February 2012, he cofounded SPARCIN with Jake Benardot. It was the first launched out of SPARC’s ‘interpreneurship’ program SPARC Ventures.

Check out this infographic from SPARCIN:

The founders of Squeeze1 are pledging to get tattoos of their company’s logo if 15,000 people signup before the launch date on February 24th.

Squeeze1 is a social platform to crowdsource support for ideas. People or companies post non-official petitions called ‘limes’ to gauge whether an endeavor is worth doing, and the community shows its support through ‘squeezes.’ The two founders created a tattoo lime in an effort to attract users. 

A statement issued by the company said Squeeze is a mix of Kickstarter, 9Gag, and Change.org, designed to “bring your ideas to life.” There is also a Crowdtilt component, but no matter how many components of other successful startups it cobbles together, Squeeze still seems like a highly unlikely business proposition. Furthermore, incentivizing people to sign up by promising to do crazy things doesn’t bode well for user acquisition down the road. Surely, there can’t be enough people interested in other people’s body art to sustain this kind of a strategy.

With so much noise in the startup scene, it is not uncommon for entrepreneurs to resort to gimmicks to get noticed, like sending out boxes of branded chocolates or wearing a crazy outfit at a demo event. My general sentiment is that if your product can’t stand up on its own, you have a bigger problem than getting noticed. Users that are only interested due to hype or incentives probably won’t stick around. Entrepreneurs should spend more time building their product and focusing on what customers really want, rather than attracting fleeting attention to something sub-par.

Perhaps we can chalk up this sort of behavior to youth. Founder James Billingham is 18 and claims to have started multiple businesses in his short life. I am sure his parents are thrilled at the prospect of a lime with a face on it being tattooed on his body for all eternity.

As for me, I may submit a lime to encourage Billingham not to get a tattoo of anthropomorphic citrus.

Koozoo is a platform that crowd-sources live video from public places to create a continuously broadcasting network. Members of the community can post and watch user-generated video feeds from places such as cafes or world landmarks. Whether you want to assess the wait time for coffee or see a real-time view of the beach, Koozoo’s goal is to make “live views of the world’s public spaces easily accessible to one and all.”

“Koozoo will usher in a new era that reads like science fiction today,” said Trevor Darrell, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement. “For example, within a few years I expect Koozoo to let you take a virtual walk down the street in Tokyo or Paris in 3D, live, as you sit comfortably at home in California.”

The platform is currently in closed beta testing in San Francisco and plans to launch in early 2013. It raised a $2.5 million seed round led by New Enterprise Associates and Tugboat Ventures, as well as angel investors, to prepare the platform for mainstream adoption.

Rohan Silva, a senior aide to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, made the announcement Sunday evening during the “Crowdsourcing Government: Why Access Matters” panel at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

The news was then promptly announced on Twitter by Tim Kelsey, the British government’s recently appointed executive director for transparency and open data.

“He will advise Government on developing innovative new ways technology can be used to give the public a greater say in the policy-making process,” a British government spokesperson told the Telegraph about Wales’ new gig.

But what would crowdsourcing a government really mean for citizens? In theory, members of the general public could use tools like wikis to make their voices better heard than through mere voting, and they could also actively participate in solving problems. For example, the U.S. runs Challenge.gov, a site that encourages innovation at federal and national agencies through contests. The communication goes both ways: When government data is freely available to the public, citizens can collaborate with the government on projects that benefit everyone, and there is an increased level of transparency for the city or country in question. At least, that’s the plan.

In the UK, the push to embrace technology has been picking up steam. The government is working on turning its main website into a portal for all government services and information. The next step, effectively gathering feedback from the masses and using that information to direct policy, will be tricky. The UK has attempted to crowdsource feedback before, with middling results. And while getting people to speak their minds isn’t difficult, deciding if and how to use that data is tricky. Would a truly crowdsourced government be utopia or “Idiocracy?”

Rakesh Rajani, a founding member of The Open Government Partnership, also participated in the talk. The Open Government Partnership is a project pushing for more government accountability and transparency.

Jimmy Wales image via Wikimedia Israel

Updated at 4:30pm PST for record $1 million amount.

Earlier this week, crowd-funding site Kickstarter set a new record when the Elevation iPhone Dock became the first project to close in on the $1 million dollar mark. But that milestone has officially been bested. In its first 24 hours, gaming studio Double Fine Adventure’s Kickstarter project has raised more than $1 million and it shows no signs of slowing down.

Double Fine’s Tim Schafer tweeted the above photo of the Double Fine team celebrating the $1 million mark.

As GamesBeat reported yesterday, Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert are legendary game-makers from the golden age of PC gaming, having created classic LucasArts adventures such as Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandando.

But in the era of Angry Birds, publishers weren’t willing to take a risk on a new project from the duo. As Schafer put it in the Kickstarter video, publishers would laugh in his face if he asked for the funds to do an old-school adventure game. But legions of fans are always asking for it, and offering to pay. So they turned to Kickstarter, hoping to raise $400,000 and offer fans a chance to watch the creative process, pitch in ideas, and even star as characters in the game.

“There’s an unprecedented opportunity to show the public what game development of this caliber looks like from the inside,” Schafer said. “Not the sanitized commercials-posing-as-interviews that marketing teams only value for their ability to boost sales, but an honest, in-depth insight into a modern art form that will both entertain and educate gamers and non-gamers alike.”

The incredible response to the project is going to give Double Fine a lot more leeway in how it crafts the game. “Additional money means it can appear on more platforms, be translated into more languages, have more music and voice, and an original soundtrack for the documentary, and more!” the team wrote in an update after passing its goal by a wide margin.

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