Waze’s crowdsourced driving data heads to local news, now 9M users strong
Thanks to its popular crowdsourced navigation app, Waze is sitting on a pile of valuable traffic data. Today the company announced an intriguing use for that data goldmine: powering your local TV station’s traffic reports.
Waze is launching a program to let any broadcast network take advantage of its citizen traffic data, which gives networks access to instant updates about traffic conditions. The company has partnered with 12 launch stations, which have been featuring Waze’s … Continue Reading
uTest grabs $17M from QuestMark, others to expand its crowdsourced testing biz
Crowdsourced app-testing startup uTest has raised $17 million in its fourth round of funding.
uTest commands a community of more than 45,000 professional testers from 180 countries and helps companies like Google, Microsoft and Intuit extensively test software applications in real-world conditions. The company’s focus is on “in-the-wild testing services,” which covers the full lifecycle of software development, including “functional, security, load, localization and usability” testing.
Back in May, we covered the company’s launch of … Continue Reading
How HiveMind’s Will Wright plans to crowdsource your happiness (interview)
Will Wright’s games from SimCity to The Sims have sold more than 100 million units. That’s why people are paying attention to his new startup and game idea, HiveMind. The Berkeley, Calif.-based company is focused on “personal gaming,” or a kind of title that can customize itself for the individual player, taking into account aspects of a player’s real-life situation as elements of the game.
We talked to Wright about HiveMind earlier this week in … Continue Reading
Inside Will Wright’s next big game: HiveMind (exclusive)
Will Wright has created some of the biggest video games of all time, from SimCity to The Sims — games that have sold well above 100 million units and generated billions in revenues. Now he’s moving on to his next idea, called HiveMind.
HiveMind is a game, and it’s also the name of a new Berkeley, Calif.-based startup Wright is unveiling today in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat.
The idea is a new evolution in … Continue Reading
Prosper takes on Wall Street, hopes to rewire banking
Peer-to-peer lending startup Prosper makes no secret of its support for the Occupy Wall Street movement, which seeks to break the hold of banks on the American political process. Prosper wants to do a similar thing, by creating a sort of bank that is owned by and run for the people.
Based near the OWS encampment in San Francisco’s Justin Herman Plaza, Prosper is using crowdfunding site Indie Gogo to host its 99 Sandwiches campaign, … Continue Reading
Humanoid puts human brainpower to work in the cloud
Humanoid is today launching the world’s first human brain-powered API for developers and programmers “that actually works.”
With Humanoid developers can harness the strength of crowd-sourcing and get accurate results, not currently available from existing solutions such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, where people around the world can complete small tasks for payment, or outsourcing hubs like oDesk or Elance. Imagine a 20,000-person workforce at your fingertips completing tasks for $4.99 per hour.
Humanoid founder Matt … Continue Reading
Cloud translation service Smartling gets a smarter platform
Web site translation service Smartling has simplified its offering to make it even easier for small businesses to translate their web sites.
New York City-based Smartling lets businesses create multilingual sites and apps using both professional and crowdsourced translators, but the process of managing translations was previously a bit cumbersome. Today’s updates will simplify the translation process, letting just about anyone create multilingual offerings in just a few minutes.
New features include a Style Guide, … Continue Reading
Top10 curates “best-of” lists using your social data, gets $3.5M
How many times have you gone looking for that list of the top 10 best X, Y and Z’s? For most of us, the answer is “constantly.” Top10 received $3.5 million in its first round of funding led by Accel Partners today to create “best of” lists using social data.
Finding a good list of the best this or that can be a hard task. This is because they are often hard to make. In … Continue Reading
Needle sales chat gets big name retailer, looks for new funding (exclusive)
Needle, a crowdsourced sales chat service, announced it has partnered with retailers SkullCandy and Under Armour.
Online shopping has become a staple of our consumer life. Sites like Amazon and eBay reported positive third quarter financial earnings, with Amazon reaching 51 percent net sales over last year. But with all this available product eyeing our wallets, Needle is betting there is need for clarity in whether a brand is right for you.
Needle is, in … Continue Reading
Crowdtap receives $7M so you can give big companies a piece of your mind
What if you got to directly influence brands like AOL, General Electric and Pinkberry while earning prizes? Crowdtap, which provides marketing research through its network of volunteers, received $7 million in funding to get you there.
According to Crowdtap, there are two big problems with marketing today. First, it’s expensive for businesses to gain insight into their potential markets. Exploring a market and testing a product has time, manpower and actual cash cost. Second, the … Continue Reading
BillGuard alerts users about questionable credit card charges
New startup BillGuard is betting there’s a market for people who would like an extra set of eyes monitoring their credit card statements for scams, billing errors, unauthorized charges and anything else that seems odd.
The company, which made its public debut at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City Monday, touts its services as “antivirus for our bills” because it scans each credit card transaction and sends out alerts for all questionable charges.… Continue Reading
CrowdFlower’s crowdsourced workers complete 100M tasks
CrowdFlower, a startup that wants to help companies distribute basic jobs to crowds of remote online workers, says that it hit two big milestones this month — it has now managed its one-millionth worker, and those workers have accomplished more than 100 million tasks.
The San Francisco startup says there are a number of jobs where a large group of people can be more effective than a small team of experts, for example if a … Continue Reading
Facebook adds new protection against dubious web links with WOT
Facebook users can now click links from other users with a little more trust. Facebook and crowdsourced website reputation service Web of Trust (WOT) begin collaboration today to give Facebook’s over 500 million users reliable protection against dubious web links.
Web of Trust is based in Helsinki, Finland. Its user community rates web pages on how trustworthy they are, so the service is able to warn users if they try to access a website with … Continue Reading
Fans are getting their say in video games
In the award-winning video game BioShock, one of the best games of 2007, there was a bar in the game called Sinclair Spirits, named after Scott Sinclair, a staffer of game developer Irrational Games. Now, in the next installment of the video game, BioShock Infinite, the developer will name something in the game after one fan.
It’s a small thing, showing appreciation for the dedication of fans who pour hours of their lives into video … Continue Reading
Crowdsourcing startup Microtask gets gamers to do some real work
A crowdsourcing startup, Microtask, is ripping crowdsourced labor into even smaller pieces. Microtask’s automated platform splits dull, repetitive tasks into tiny pieces and distributes them over the Internet.
The company announced that it’s pulled in over 25,000 volunteers to help on it’s first major project to date, Digitalkoot (Finnish for Digital Volunteers — Microtask is based in Finland). The volunteers are helping to digitize the archives of the National Library of Finland by playing online … Continue Reading
Software bug testing on the go: uTest heads to the iPhone, iPad
Crowdsourcing is proving to be highly useful these days, whether it’s used for getting real-time traffic data, providing accurate business listings, or testing for software bugs, which is the business the Southborough, Mass.-based uTest is in.
Now the company is taking software testing truly mobile, as it has launched a native testing app for both the iPhone and the iPad (available free on the iTunes store).
The company’s idea is to outsource software testing, a … Continue Reading
Waze revs up crowdsourced driving app with $25M
Waze, makers of an innovative crowdsourced app that offers free driving directions, is on a roll. The company just announced that it has scored $25 million in a second round of funding.
Waze says the funding will be used to “expand corporate and marketing initiatives,” build up its core infrastructure, and increase its staff as the company moves its headquarters from Tel Aviv to Palo Alto. In an interview, the company told VentureBeat that its … Continue Reading
CrowdFlower taps the power of the crowd to get more accurate business listings (exclusive)
CrowdFlower is one of many Web 2.0 businesses that taps the power of the crowd to get work done. Today, the company is formally releasing its Business Listing Verification service, which gives companies accurate business contact data that has been recently verified.
This kind of service is important in the current economy, where many businesses are changing locations or contact information. I could benefit from it myself; I once sent 10 people to a restaurant … Continue Reading
NewsBasis: Death to the bad PR pitch!
NewsBasis, the startup aiming to make communication between journalists and the companies they cover smooth as butter, is launching a new media-relations service today that hopes to bring publicity to small companies which can’t afford a professional PR firm’s monthly retainer.
Content publishers who are overwhelmed with the rigid PR apparatus that spews an unstoppable torrent of unfiltered pitches and cold calls may also benefit.
Brevity is a key feature: NewsBasis allows companies and organizations, … Continue Reading
Kurani Interactive gets a shot of angel funding to get the Internet's opinion on the fly
Kurani Interactive, developer of the Opinionaided iPhone application, announced today that it has secured $275,000 in funding from crowdsourcing angel investor Chuck Chesler and Al Angrisani, a former CEO of market research companies.
Opinionaided is an application for the iPhone and iPad that lets users post questions that any other user can answer. The idea is to get the consensus opinion of the Internet on matters ranging from fashion to which restaurant to visit. Users … Continue Reading
