Barhoum and well over a dozen others were victims of shoddy online detective work. Their identities were broadcast publicly, and they were accused of crimes they had nothing to do with and maligned by the national media as terrorists. In reality, they weren’t even being investigated by the authorities involved with the case. Instead, the’d been commenters on Reddit and 4Chan, who believed they were guilty based upon their clothes and appearance. What started as an atypical request from the FBI to the public, asking people to send in any photos and videos they had of the bomb scene, quickly morphed into an ugly digital witch hunt; one where the crowd’s fears, prejudices, and suspicions were given credence, while guilt and innocence were doled out based on shreds of circumstantial evidence.

In the four days, three hours, and nine minutes between the detonation of the first bomb and the Boston Police Department tweeting that the final suspect had been captured, a new approach for conducting crowdsourced investigations was established.

Although media outlets have been quick to lump all of the crowdsourced efforts together, there were two very different processes occurring, which proved to have drastically different outcomes: Crowdsourced intelligence gathering — a massive success — and crowdsourced crime solving — an abysmal failure. The FBI only ever asked for the first, but both happened simultaneously. They each offer important glimpses into major issues surrounding the future of law enforcement, justice, and surveillance.

In many ways, the Boston Marathon provided one of the most compelling cases for crowd involvement, ever. It’s one of the largest athletic events in the world (event planners estimate upwards of 500,000 people attend each year); the vast majority of attendees have smartphones, and a sizeable portion of those were actively taking pictures and videos throughout the event. Surveillance cameras have become ubiquitous, but they are fixed in place and have large blind spots. People, on the other hand, can provide deep context and multiple points of view of the same situation. For that reason, it’s a natural fit for Big Brother to look to tens of thousands of “Little Brothers” for help in gathering intelligence. After all, there is no police snooping network that could rival the surveillance regime of our smartphone lifestyles.

But regardless what the FBI wants, it can’t stop people from trying to conduct their own investigations. Events now play out in real time. The ability for a person sitting at home to have access to rich, detailed information about an event, as it happens, is magnitudes greater than what was available in the past. It is unlikely that this trend will reverse. Human beings love to speculate and gossip; now, we just do it together publicly. We’ve been empowered with communication and collaborative tools far more powerful than our own understanding of them.

When Richard Jewell, the security guard/hero of the 1996 Olympic Bombings, had his life and reputation destroyed by false accusations from the media, he was able to sue them for compensation. But when Sunil Tripathi, a student at Brown University who has been missing for the last month, was declared to be a vicious murderer because somebody misheard a police scanner, all his grieving family received was an anonymous apology. One of the largest questions these events raise involves defining what free speech online is. Is a person allowed to make a deeply damning accusation about somebody based on suspicion if others are doing it also and they believe it to be in the public interest?

The traditional media could play an enormously valuable role here by separating fact from fiction and providing verified, trustworthy information. Instead, most outlets just repeated false claims made online — providing a megaphone to statements that should never have seen the light of day.

The opening of investigations to the public is going to happen, and law enforcement groups have no choice but to embrace and try to get ahead of this trend. Even in this investigation, the crowd’s own efforts forced the FBI to release information earlier than it had planned. The FBI made the wise decision to set up a page where people could upload potential evidence, but before it even got around to creating this, citizens had already set up their own page. The medium on which this case was discussed made a difference in the quality of discourse as well; for example, Reddit fared better than 4Chan because of a system where true information could be “upvoted” and false information could be “downvoted.” Where the conversation about the next case takes place will directly shape how it plays out.

Despite its failings in this case, the crowd has proved itself to be an important force for public safety in the past. Like with many crowdsourcing-related activities, individuals are good at providing information or reporting events, but it is the next stage — taking action — where things often fall apart. The more passive their role, the more effective they have been. Seattle’s Police Department runs a program where citizens can receive tweets about and report when they spot stolen cars. German police have experimented with posting sketches of wanted criminals on Facebook, where citizens’ identifications have already led to several arrests. In another example, a Broward County Sheriff has leveraged his 10,000 Facebook friends to successfully track down stolen goods.

We now live in a world where information moves faster than we can assess its value… this is especially true in times of panic, disaster, and crisis. While an active terrorist investigation might not be the best place to allow wannabe detectives with no training, there are certainly situations where they can be helpful. We each have the potential to play a role in being guardians of public safety, but this requires from us a large degree of focus, caution, and care. Ultimately, these are the things that separate an empowered crowd from a raging mob.

Tarun Wadhwa is a research associate at Singularity University researching how advancing technologies can be used to solve public policy issues. 

Follow him on Twitter @twadhwa

Shortly after two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, the FBI called on the people of Twitter to submit photos, videos, and any other information about the scene.

Some said this would be the first crowdsourced crime investigation. And people on 4chan, a famously anarchic message board, took the crowdsourcing into their own hands, combing through photos and video and posting annotated pictures in an attempt to finger the suspects on their own.

Score one for traditional police work. The FBI released photos today showing its two main suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings. None of the photos match the 4chan’s picks.

In the aftermath of the bombings, the Internet lit up with attempts to raise funds for victims, connect people who met on the track, and find the individuals who committed such an ugly crime. But “suspects” were called out incorrectly. The New York Post printed an image of two men with backpacks at the race, calling them “BAG MEN” and claiming that law enforcement was on the hunt for them. It turned out not to be the case, causing Reddit to delete any posts that linked to the image and ban anyone who attempted to upload the story.

4Chan went on its own search for the individuals and created the “4Chan Think Tank,” an Imgur page with over 50 images of people it felt were suspicious.

With the FBI’s release today, however, we see that none of them really match up. Some images do get close with similar clothing styles, baseball caps, and more. But the FBI pictures have major differences from 4chan’s images. For example, a figure seen repeatedly in 4chan’s pictures has a white baseball cap, like the one in the FBI photo, but their clothes don’t match.

For now, crowdsourced detective work hasn’t gone much farther than pointing fingers. Perhaps the FBI involved crowdsourcing in some way, perhaps using tweeted pictures, YouTube videos, and more to put the pieces together, but at some point the general public just doesn’t have as many resources to hunt these guys now.

So, let’s ask ourselves. Do citizen detectives serve the public — or just promote fear?

Photo credit: FBI

CrowdMed is a crowdsourced medical diagnosis platform. The company participated in the most recent Y Combinator class and launched publicly today at the TEDMED event in Washington, D.C.

“The premise of the wisdom of crowds is that a large group of nonexperts can be very wise once you have the right mechanisms in place to aggregate their collective intelligence,” said founder Jared Heyman in an interview with VentureBeat. “Many people operate under the assumption that crowds are unwieldy, but they can be smarter than expert individuals. If I had to choose between one doctor and one random person on the street for a diagnosis, I would choose the doctor. But if I have to pick between one doctor and hundreds of people with relevant information to share, I would pick the crowd.”

Heyman previously founded an online market research firm called Infosurv, where he experienced the power and accuracy of collective wisdom, and its capability to predict potential outcomes. In 2003, his sister got sick with an undiagnosed medical condition. She spent years going to specialist after specialist, but none of them could figure out what was wrong. By the time she was diagnosed with a rare disease that affects one in 15,000 women, she had seen 16 different doctors and racked up over $100,000 in medical bills.

“This illness almost killed her — she lost three years of her life,”  he said. “Many physicians are hyper-specialized these days and have a hard time seeing things outside of their speciality. This is a problem with the medical system, which meant my sister couldn’t get an accurate diagnosis. I thought there has to be an alternative between Google searches and WebMD and bouncing from doctor to doctor.”

Heyman said that while individuals can only hold so much knowledge in their heads, a crowd can hold an infinite amount. On CrowdMed, people anonymously submit a case into the system, providing information about symptoms, medicine history, demographics, family history, and case reports. Then the community of “medical detectives” (MDs)  suggest likely diagnoses and place bets on which outcomes they think are correct. CrowdMed’s patented prediction market technology aggregates feedback from the crowd and distills it down to a probability that can be assigned to different diagnostic suggestions for each patient. There is a leaderboard, so MDs only offer suggestions or place bets when they have something valuable to contribute.

“Our philosophy is that medicine is an individual sport right now, with doctors working in isolation to solve a patients’ case,” Heyman said. “We believe it should be a team sport, with lots of people collaborating to provide accurate diagnoses more quickly at a lower cost. This goes against the grain of how medicine is viewed today, based on the knowledge of experts who go to school for a lot of years and have a prefix before their name.”

The founders have been developing CrowdMed for four years. During the beta period, they built up a community of more than 700 people through word-of-mouth and through partnerships with organizations like Stanford medical school. So far, about 25 cases have gone through the system, and Heyman said they have a “high hit rate.” He gave the example of a child with a rare disease called Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections, or PANDAS for short. The patient had previously visited over 20 doctors and generated $250,000 in medical bills. Heyman said on CrowdMed, he got the correct diagnosis in a few hours because one of the detectives was familiar with his symptoms. The technology amplified this insight, the community agreed with it, and the solution was assigned the highest probability.

The service costs $199 per case with a full money-back guarantee if the diagnostic suggestions are not satisfying. CrowdMed also collects a $20 refundable deposit when users tell them the final correct diagnosis, to reward the MD community. Heyman said that they are working on a partnership with a major medical journal, and hope that instead of competing with physicians, CrowdMed becomes a tool they themselves use to achieve greater diagnostic success.

Along with its launch, CrowdMed also revealed that it has closed an initial seed round of $1.1 million led by New Enterprsise Associates and including Y Combinator, SV Angel, Andresseen Horowitz, and Greylock Partners.

Photo Credit: CrowdMed

The ability of technology to impact healthcare is one of the topics discussed at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s upcoming health conference.

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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Not everybody has a designer on call to craft their wardrobe staples, but a startup called Gustin is redefining the way menswear is designed, created, and sold. Today, the company launched a fully crowdsourced, crowdfunded premium menswear brand and accompanying platform, which sets up a new model for the fashion world.

“We are turning the fashion industry on its head and breaking all the rules,” said founder Josh Gustin during an interview. “We are offering the highest-quality product, crowdsourced, and delivered at wholesale prices. Our goal is to create the perfect pair of jeans and create a super efficient collection that responds directly to what people want. The value proposition is huge, but the community is even bigger. No brand has ever tried this before on this level, and thus no other brand has the flexibility we do. When industry people started getting scared and defensive, we knew we were on to something.”

I met with Gustin and his cofounder Stephen Powell for a tour of the San Francisco production facility, which is tucked down a side road in the heart of downtown. The room was filled with stacks of denim, pockets, zippers, and thread, and the constant din of sewing machines. Unlike many clothing brands, which outsource their production overseas, Gustin and Powell’s office space is across the street and they regularly stop by to ensure that the work is up to their high standards. During the interview, they told me about the company’s background, vision, and how it came to be the largest fashion Kickstarter of all time.

Gustin entered the fashion world while attending graduate school at University of California Berkeley. He realized he’d rather pursue his fashion dreams than work in a bank. He spent a summer learning everything he could about denim and built a premium line of men’s jeans that sold in high-end boutiques. He grew frustrated with the traditional process of designing, manufacturing, convincing boutiques to sell his clothing, and then hoping consumers bought it.

Together, Gustin and Powell launched a Kickstarter campaign to back the production of the next line. They posted one style of jeans, which sold out and surpassed its $20,000 goal in less than 24 hours. To keep up with demand, the duo took a whirlwind, overnight road trip to LA, where they scooped up all the denim that caught their eye. They added more and more fabrics to the selection on their Kickstarter page, and the campaign ultimately closed at $450,000, with orders for 19 different styles.

“Clearly, we have struck a chord with people who want boutique-quality clothing at a reasonable price point, said Powell during the interview. “But Kickstarter is not a platform for sales, so we realized if this model was going to work, we would need our own platform. A lot of guys say that once they get these jeans, they never want to order anything else again. Denim is just the beginning.”

Fashion production requires a lot of guesswork. Designers and retailers have to guess what consumers will like and how many pieces of each item they are likely to buy. It is not cost-effective for brands to produce limited edition lines, and garments often sell out, or worse, don’t sell at all and gather dust on retail shelves. Gustin’s approach eliminates all the guesswork by only producing items that consumers have already backed.

“We can move so much quicker than other brands,” Powell said. We never sell out of any size or any cut because everything is custom-made. If 200 people say they want belts, we can turn that around in a day. We just ask ‘how can we make the best belt possible?’ and however much that comes out to be is how much it costs. It is still 60 percent less than other brands, and we don’t have to cut corners. It also means we can run just five pairs of a certain style if we want, without worrying about hitting a minimum.”

This platform not only cuts inefficiencies out of the manufacturing process, but it is built on a direct pipeline to consumer desires and an active level of customer engagement that other brands lust over and spend significant amounts of money to tap into. Programmer Paul Graham is known for saying “make something people want,” and Gustin’s model does exactly that. Transparency, authenticity, and quality are central to the fabric of the company.

“This is part of the same transition a lot of other industries have already been through with technology,” Gustin said. “It is a shift from power of the brand to the power of the consumer. We are laying bare the brand and saying ‘these are our beliefs, but it will be nothing unless people directly support us.’ Something about the creative element of fashion keeps brands on a pedestal and lets them keep distance from consumers. This model lets us still do the thing we love, which is never cut a corner and design everything we like, and if only a few get into production, that’s fine. Why design stuff if no one wants to wear it?

Gustin is building more than a great line of jeans. It is a company leveraging the Internet’s power of communication, the momentum of crowdsourcing, and a growing national interest in products that are high-quality and have a story behind them. The jeans themselves are an example of old-fashioned craftsmanship. Sewing machines are the most advanced piece of technology in the factory and every step of the process is human-powered. The real innovation lays in Gustin’s fresh approach to building a consumer goods company and redefining the production process in a leaner, more direct, more responsive way.

If Steve Jobs was still around, he could order 100 pairs of Gustins just for himself. Although he was dedicated to another little San Francisco denim company called Levis.

Photo Credit: Gustin

Wikipedia pages should get a lot quicker very soon as the foundation behind the world’s largest and most popular encyclopedia have turned on Lua, a lightweight scripting engine, to speed up access to complex pages. And the site is asking its editors and contributors to learn the new programming language to help make the site quicker.

Those who have ever edited Wikipedia pages will know that the site, like many wikis, uses “Wikitext language” — a sort of a simplified HTML — to enable users to add content chunks, templates, and formatting to a page.

But there was a problem, as Wikimedia’s Sumana Harihareswara posted recently:

But because we’d never planned for wikitext to become a programming language, these templates were terribly inefficient and hacky — they didn’t even have recursion or loops — and were terrible for performance. When you edit a complex article like Tulsi Gabbard, with scores of citations, it can take up to 30 seconds to parse and display the page.

Lua is an embedded scripting language, built so that lightweight but powerful code can be embedded right into web pages. It’s often used as a scripting engine for games. And it’s much quicker than Wikipedia’s existing wikitext solution.

The big question is, of course, is how Wikipedians will take to the new language, which is unfamiliar and potentially more complex than wikitext. And will we start encountering bugs on Wikipedia pages as editors and maintainers now become programmers?

“Now is the first time that the Wikimedia site maintainers have enabled real coding that affects all readers. We’re letting people program Wikipedia unsupervised,” Harihareswara wrote. “Anyone can write a chunk of code to be included in an article that will be seen by millions of people, often without much review. We are taking our “anyone can edit” maxim one big step forward.”

And, she added, that if any Wikipedia user doesn’t look the load time of a page, they can now do something about and improve it themselves, in a very Wikipedian way:

“Just as we crowdsourced building Wikipedia, now we’re crowdsourcing bits of infrastructure improvement. And this kind of massively multiplayer, crowdsourced performance improvement is uniquely us.”

The read-write revolution continues.

photo credit: Stewart via photopin cc

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Crowdsourcing isn’t rocket science — except when it is.

3D modeling platform Sunglass is teaming up with space company DIYRockets to design the first wave of crowd-designed rockets. Via their new design competition, the companies are offering $10,000 to teams who can collaborate to create the best, cheapest rocket parts.

DIYRockets founder Darlene Damm says that the project will do for the world of rockets what Wikipedia did to the world of information. ”Once you create a community around this stuff, you start changing how the rest of the industry works,” she said.

Essentially, by opening up design tools to the greater population, DIYRockets is democratizing an industry that, for most of its history, has been open to only a select few. And that’s the power of the Internet.

The project is also big news for Sunglass as it shows just how far the company’s collaborative design platform can go. ”We already have thousands of private projects running on our platform right now, but this represents the opportunity to take things to a much higher level,”Sunglass co-founder Nitin Rao said.

Also joining the fray is 3D printing company Shapeways, which will offer $500 in free 3D printing for the two leading design teams.

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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Pro Tools, as many of you may know, is the industry-standard creative software suite for musicians.

It’s also the name of the latest product from 99designs, the crowdsourced spec work site for getting creative work done on the cheap.

Pro Tools is a digital audio platform for Mac and Windows made by Avid and first released in 1991, according to Wikipedia. It’s in just about every professional audio/video setup. Ad agencies often have in-house A/V specialists and Pro Tools experts whose only job is to edit audio using Pro Tools.

According to 99designs, Pro Tools is a digital software suite for ad agencies to find freelancers and work with clients. While it’s unlikely that there’s any overlap between the functions of the two products, we’re confused as to why 99designs would choose a name — and not a great name, at that — that was already so closely aligned with another company’s software.

And that’s the kind of confusion that leads to trademark lawsuits.

“We’re aware of that product and aren’t concerned as we don’t see any legal or other problematic issues arising there,” a 99designs rep wrote to VentureBeat this morning in an email.

However, the Avid reps we contacted might see some legal or other problematic issues arising there. They’re looking into the situation now and promised to get back to us shortly.

The 99design folks did not contact Avid prior to the launch; our contact said that after discussing the matter internally, the team decided to proceed with the launch and not pursue a trademark for the name.

99designs also would make the point that its software is for a different industry — ads, not music. However, given the number of Pro Tools editor positions at ad agencies, a fair argument could be made to the contrary.

A bit more about the 99designs version of Pro Tools: The company’s target audience of mid-sized to small web and marketing agencies are usually coming to 99designs to find freelance graphic design work. They are looking for fresh talent, but the site’s crowdsourced contest model means they get to see a lot of work from a lot of creatives for very little money before making their decision.

The new 99designs software suite includes invite-only contests to help agencies set a higher bar for crowdsourced submissions, presentation tools for working with clients, private and “blind” contests to keep IP on lock, and custom non-disclosure agreements to work better with careful clients and freelance designers.

All in all, it’s right in line with what 99designs already does. We just gotta ask: Couldn’t they have come up with a better name?

Totally objectively, “Pro Tools” is just a crap name for a product. It’s generic and vague. Heck, my face is a pro tool. The Internet is a pro tool. A jackhammer is a pro tool. The phrase “pro tool” in and of itself has absolutely no meaning — outside its now universally acknowledged meaning related to audio software.

And what about SEO? No search engine in the world is going to take a “Pro Tools” query and serve up a 99designs page.

Huh. Maybe they shoulda crowdsourced that.

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New York-based Insight Venture Partners has invested in Tongal, a startup that plans to use the funding for a rapid expansion. Tongal links writers, directors, actors, social media experts, and other creators with brands. Among the companies that have participated are Lego, Pringles, McDonald’s and Axe.

The brands say what they want in terms of a “creative need,” or the kind of advertising they want to do. Tongal then shares that with its community members, who compete to produce the best ad concept. The winning community member gets a cash prize, while the brand gets a potentially high-quality video produced in a short time and at lower cost than a typical ad agency would be able to do.

To date, Marina Del Rey, Calif.-based Tongal members have earned $3 million. Tongal’s own revenue grew 400 percent last year.

Rob Salvatore, James DeJulio, and Mark Burrell founded Tongal in 2008. They believe that breakthrough ideas can come from anywhere, that global creative talent was being under-utilized, and that brand marketers could benefit from accessing the imagination and skills of amateurs all around the world.

The challenges on the site start with an idea round. The sponsor selects the best idea submissions, and then technically skilled filmmakers bring those winning ideas to life. The process takes less than eight weeks.

“Our brand customers are thrilled with the quality and in-market performance of videos being produced on Tongal, as well the unexpected and fresh ideas that emerge,” said DeJulio, president of Tongal, in a statement.

The crowdsourced funding platform remained true to its artistic roots. Despite many well-known gadget Kickstarter campaigns like the Ouya gaming console, which raised $8.6 million, the biggest categories included games at $83 million raised, followed by film and video, design, then music, with technology coming in fifth place with $29 million.

1. Games: $83.1 million
2. Film & video: $57.9 million
3. Design: $50.1 million
4. Music: $35 million
5. Technology: $29 million
6. Publishing: $15.3 million
7. Food: $11.1 million
8. Art: $10.5 million
9. Comics: $9.2 million
10. Theater: $7.1 million
11. Fashion: $6.3 million

Almost 600,000 people backed two or more projects, with 50,047 backing 1o or more, and a very dedicated 452 people backing an incredible 100 or more projects: essentially one every three days.

The category with the most funded projects was music, with 5,067 projects funded, but games took in the most cash: $83 million. An astonishing 17 projects took in over $1 million each.

Highlighted projects include:

• Double Fine Adventure (a game that collected $3.3 million)
• Balloon Mapping Kits (DIY mapping efforts that Google included in Maps)
• MaKey MaKey (an invention kit that received over half a million in pledges)
• Safecast X Kickstarter Geiger Counter (an open-source Geiger counter)
• The Edge and Back (6th graders who raised $5,100 to send a camera to space and bring it back)
• 3G Space Suit (a civilian’s space suit)
• Pizza Brain (the world’s first pizza museum)
• 1,000 Student Projects in Space (1,000 student experiments in ping-pong balls, sent to space)
• Baghdad Community Hackerspace (the name says it all)
• OpenROV (an open-source underwater robot)

18,109 projects funded? I think we can safely say that’s 18,109 chunks of awesome.

Image credit: Crowdsourcing

We’ve seen a great deal of speculation in the past week about Apple buying a company to help it solve its nagging mapping headache. The big rumor, both started and squashed by TechCrunch, was Waze, the crowdsourced mapping and traffic app.

The only problem with that theory? Waze would only slow Apple down.

At least, according to Skobbler’s Marcus Thielking. He’s the cofounder of Skobbler, a spinoff from Navigon that sells one of the top mapping solutions in the world: GPS Navigation 2. It’s got a No. 1 sales ranking in app stores in 20 countries and has sold more than three million copies. It’s also based on OpenStreetMap, the crowdsourced “Wikipedia of maps.”

“There are only two companies that could possibly make sense for Apple to buy,” Thielking said this morning from Europe. “There’s Garmin, which doesn’t use TomTom, on which Apple Maps is built, and there’s TomTom itself. TomTom would be my bet.”

The problem that Apple faces? Buying just any mapping company is not a solution. Apple needs a quick fix — something on the order of months, not years — and buying a company with an incompatible dataset or base technology would ensure a long, painful integration process.

“Purchasing a company that has the talent but does not necessarily solve their issues right away … it could be feasible, but it would probably take a two-year time frame … and that’s not what Apple is looking for,” he told me.

And the core mapping technology is not even what Waze is focused on anymore, according to Thielking, who sees Waze as having pivoted from its initial vision of mapping toward traffic solutions for drivers. That’s significant, because the hard part of mapping is not necessarily the basic grid of the roads: It’s the details in navigation and the richness of local data.

That hard part is why Skobbler uses OpenStreetMap data. With more than a million contributions as of today or tomorrow, the dataset is unsurpassed in some regions — especially in hyperlocal data — and growing quickly in many others. But Apple can’t use OpenStreetMap, according to Thielking, since as a global company it cannot simply focus on the areas where OSM has good data — it needs a global solution with a fairly high global level of quality.

And it needs that solution quickly.

“Owning a digital map these days and especially in the future is an incredibly valuable resource. It’s very hard to copy and very fundamental to everything, particularly in an era of mobile solutions and mobile data,” Thielking says. “That is why Google is doing what they’re doing … and it’s one of the reasons why Apple is in this space.”

Apple wanted to trump Google’s mapping product, but blew it in terms of recognizing the massive complexity of any mapping product, Thielking told me.

All of which means that if there’s any company that Apple might or should be looking to acquire, it would be TomTom.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

The race for starting off your new business venture in the new year is well underway. You’re going to need a new logo for that new business idea. You’re going to want to get that web design fleshed out so that you can launch your first website. You figure it’s about time to style up your business cards. The bottom line is that you have a lot design work that needs to get done…now where are you going to go to get it done?

The great thing about 99designs is that no matter what your design needs may be, you can tap into the talent of hundreds of talented artists. And the great thing about this VB Store time-limited promotion is that you can get $140 worth of crowdsourcing credit and upgrades for your next 99designs design contest for only $40.

You can use the credit towards any of your design needs, be it:

• Logo design
• Business card design
• T-shirt design
• Brochure design
• Web page design
• Mobile app design
• …and more!

How does 99designs work? It’s simple, really.

1. Post your design project. Create your detailed project brief and kick-off your own design contest. You set the guidelines…scope, price, timing and all other aspects of the design project. Once completed, designers browsing for projects will find your brief and if they decided to submit an entry, it will be presented to you as they are completed. Depending on the scope of the project, you may receive several, or even dozens, of entries.
2. Give feedback and collaborate. As the designs come in, you can provide continual feedback on the submissions. On the right track but not exactly the right color? Shift the logo to the left? No problem, you can provide as much feedback as you wish in order to help the designers deliver exactly what you had in mind.
3. Choose your favorite and reward your designer. Feedback may be submitted to the designers up until you find a satisfactory design. Once selected, you will pay the designer the predetermined amount and receive the copyright to the original design. Congrats! You crowdsourced your first design job.

If you don’t fall in love with any of the designs, we have a full 30 day money-back guarantee from the date of your purchase. And if you like more than one design, you can declare multiple winners, and pay them each the pre-determined price accordingly.

With a simple and straightforward process, a roster of talented designers, and a money-back guarantee, there is no reason to stick with a single graphic designer again. Now you can crowdsource your design needs with this VB Store promotion for just $40.

So get it while you can!

The army tells recruits to “be all that you can be.” While in the military context, this statement relates to physical prowess and leadership skills, InfoArmy applies the same principal to business intelligence.

InfoArmy is a marketplace where researchers, analysts, or anyone with the requisite skill set can make extra money by writing competitive intelligence reports. The startup has raised $17.3 million in its second round of funding to “recruit a global army of researchers to build the largest and most comprehensive database of business intelligence reports in existence.”

These fightin’ words come from chief executive Jim Fowler, a veteran of the BI industry who is using his training, experience, and expertise to strike fear into the heart of the enemy. I mean incumbents.

As it stands, business intelligence reports come from large companies like Reuters, Forrester, Gartner, and Dun & Bradstreet. They take operational data, considering factors like company size, traction, revenue, expenditures, and turn it into actionable information.

This information can be used for a number of purposes. Venture capitalists may refer to these reports when investigating potential investments, and marketing teams use this kind of data to make strategic decisions. The legacy providers, however, are expensive and can be slow to update their offerings. Fowler saw an opportunity to make an impact.

“If you look at the business intelligence industry, there has been very little innovation and we are employing the effort and wisdom of the crowd to disrupt it,” he said. “If I am 90 years old and there are tens of thousands of people in developing countries making a living off this platform, who were given a chance to go and use their brains instead of their backs, that will be incredibly satisfying.”

In the few short months since launching, InfoArmy has amassed 3,500 registered researchers on six continents. These people are tasked with specific company assignments and reference multiple credible sources when filling out the research fields. Before a report is published, it must be approved by a senior researcher or “officer” to ensure quality.  Each one costs $100 and researchers keep half the proceeds from each sale. Reports will be updated each quarter so they stay current.

There are 2,000 reports available on InfoArmy and this hefty funding will be used to grow as quickly as possible.

“We have three steps on our road to global domination,” Fowler said. “10,000 [reports] is the next step, where can sell unlimited use subscriptions to VC firms, sales teams etc. After that, we want to reach 100,000. We believe that is critical mass when we terrify incumbents. If we get to 1 million, we will be international juggernaut in data business.”

Fowler was previously the founder of Jigsaw, a data-as-a-service platform that crowd sourced contact information for business professionals and companies. It sold to Salesforce for $142 million in 2010, but Fowler said just couldn’t resign himself to a life of leisure and doing daily yoga classes with his wife. Instead, he self-funded InfoArmy into existence.

“I made all the money that I’m going to need for my life with Jigsaw,” he said.  “This is not about money, this is about wanting to create something really big and meaningful. Getting people to work at these information-style jobs is going to make the world a better place over time. We also value transparency of information, which is a always good for society. What this company will do is inject a layer of transparency on private companies that heretofore has been a domain of public companies. It will force a great level of accountability.”

Right now, InfoArmy concentrates on private, venture-backed technology companies, but it is starting to expand into other verticals, as well as global markets. It focuses on companies with high growth potential and their competitors. The $17.3 million Series B funding round came from Norwest Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures, and adds to Fowler’s initial $2 million Series A.

“There was no way I could have raised a round of funding like this at this point in Jigsaw’s life,” he said. “Raising money is a lot easier the second time around, as is hiring, but there is a lot more pressure. Now, I am not a first time entrepreneurs and supposed to know what I am doing.”

Whether he is addressing widespread unemployment, keeping private companies honest, or avoiding daily yoga sessions with his wife, Fowler is leading a squadron of information professionals into a future he sees as better. Read more on VentureBeat.

That’s a significant step in crowdsourcing, similar to Finland inviting the public into the making of new laws, and it’s a reminder that democracy itself is an act of crowdsourcing — sourcing, in effect, authority from the crowd.

Initial reviews of the new constitution are positive for inclusiveness, respect for individual rights, and innovation. In fact, a report by ConstitutionMaking.org says:

Iceland’s constitution-making process has been tremendously innovative and participatory. Though squarely grounded in Iceland’s constitutional tradition as embodied in the 1944 Constitution, the proposed draft reflects significant input from the public and would mark an important symbolic break with the past. It would also be at the cutting edge of ensuring public participation in ongoing governance, a feature that we argue has contributed to constitutional endurance in other countries.

But it’s not without its issues.

Article 63, for instance, on religious freedom, seems to give with one hand and take with the other. One wonders who determines what is “prejudicial to good morals or public order.”

All persons have the right to form religious associations and to practice their religion in conformity with their individual convictions. Nothing may however be preached or practised which is prejudicial to good morals or public order.

Or article 73, which seems to contradict itself, saying first that the law cannot allow censorship, and then in the next sentence that freedom of expression can be restricted by law in the interests of public order or state security.

The law may never provide for censorship or other similar limitations to freedom of expression.

Freedom of expression may only be restricted by law in the interests of public order or the security of the State, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights or reputation of others, if such restrictions are deemed necessary and in agreement with democratic traditions.

I’m no constitutional lawyer, and this is an English interpretation of the Icelandic constitution, so there may be some translation issues (although it is on an official Icelandic government website), but I’m wondering if the new constitution will require some massaging when it comes up for parliamentary approval.

photo credit: solidether via photopin cc

Hat tip: GigaOm

From tech events to scientific research, startups are proving that you can crowdsource and crowdfund almost anything.

Startups often turn to crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo to get their ideas off the ground. But at a later stage, when they’re ready for an exit, can they crowdsource knowledge from the experts?

Likewise, companies often make erroneous decisions when it comes to M&A; they are losing millions of dollars in the process. Tech companies that frequently buy-up rising startups (Cisco, Oracle, Salesforce, Google, Facebook to name a few) aren’t immune from making mistakes. How can we bring the wisdom of the crowd to corporate development teams?

Merjerz has built a website to bring together acquirers with desirable startups — it’s like dating site for M&A. Anyone can lend their expertise to the process by reviewing a startup, and offering their take on the company culture, the market opportunity, and more.

On Merjerz, which has been in beta for over a month, professionals from any industry propose deals. Users can login with Facebook, LinkedIn or register on the site, and vote for, comment on and follow deals, which will push updates to their email. According to Schreiber, corporate development and M&A officers at several large-sized tech companies have already taken notice of relevant deals.

Other deal management software tools on the market include Midaxo and Axial Market. But this is the first attempt at applying the crowdsourcing thesis to M&A — the challenge will be to pique enough people’s interest in the topic and to convince the experts to contribute to the site. Merjerz will be most valuable if they can convince employees to anonymously tip off potential acquirers about potential problems with the company culture before the deal takes place. 

Arye Schreiber, cofounder of Merjerz

“We collect the insights and knowledge of the informed crowds and [we] make that available to companies doing M&A,” explained Arye Schreiber, the cofounder and chief executive. Prior to forming Merjerz, the Israeli entrepreneur worked at power-supply company, Lighttech Electronic Industries and Lehman Brothers. He has experienced first-hand how companies can be thoughtless when it comes to M&A.

When he was working at Lighttech, a light bulb went off.  Schreiber told me his company was approached by bankers representing a small public Canadian company, Carmanah, who made an acquisition offer.

“The deal didn’t make much sense, but they never asked for our opinions,” he said. “This was pure empire-building. We ended up signing a Merger Agreement, and they spectacularly announced the deal as dead.”

According to news reports, a lawsuit was filed, the executive who led this transaction was let go, and the company’s stock plummeted. In the end, Lightech was acquired by GE, “a happy ending” despite the circumstances, according to Schreiber.

“There has to be a better way for people to avoid stupid deals,” he added. “So I set about building one.” The team of three founders is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. They are in talks with investors, and are already in the process of closing a first round of funding.

Image via Shutterstock

Ever wish you could do some good with your gaming? A new partnership between social and mobile game developer RocketOwl and WeForest.org is turning virtual trees into real ones.

Play2Plant — the Ottawa, Ontario-based company’s tree-planting campaign — allows gamers to make a positive impact on the environment by playing GreenSpace. As SpaceJanitors, players save the galaxy from destruction by cleaning up planets and restoring them to their former beauty. That means sorting through hundreds of years’ worth of garbage and building more sustainable energy sources as well as engaging in traditional social gameplay, such as connecting with friends and customizing environments and avatars.

When players reach certain milestones, RocketOwl will match their efforts by giving them a special edition WeForest tree decoration to place in their world — and planting a tree in real life. Users can also obtain one of these decorations for 10 RocketFuel, the game’s currency, and the developer will plant a tree for every one purchased. Not too shabby for a debut game.

“So often when people try to promote social causes, they try to instill fear or use shock value as motivation to get involved, and people are getting tired of it,” Graeme Barlow, the chief executive officer of RocketOwl, told GamesBeat. “Environmental causes are a really hot topic right now that has everyone talking, but people aren’t necessarily taking the next steps to get involved and make a difference. That’s why we need fun and interactive ways get people involved, like gaming. Let’s be honest, not everyone is going to want to go outside, get dirty, and plant a tree. But spend a few minutes playing a game? That’s something that most people can handle.

“One of the initial milestones is to have players clean the starting set of islands to unlock a tree that will be planted in the real world. We start players off with five really exciting islands that represent some of the renewable technologies that are shown off in GreenSpace. We’re also working hard to build more milestones and triggers into the game to allow players to unlock more trees as they progress. For players that aren’t interested in committing the time, we also have an option that allows them to purchase a tree for $1.99.”

Through crowdsourcing, Play2Plant can enlist the public’s help with tackling environmental issues like deforestation, carbon sequestration, water management, soil restoration, biodiversity, and local economic development. With these kinds of games and initiatives, RocketOwl believes that promoting social change can be fun, increasing the likelihood that people will become more involved in the future.

“We’re addressing social causes through gaming, but it’s really important to our company that we continue to make games that put fun first,” said Barlow. “When players are having fun, everything else comes naturally, and we’re confident that our players are going to make a big difference through the tree planting initiative.”

GreenSpace is on Facebook and the App Store for iPad and is coming soon to Android and Windows 8 in Q4, before Christmas.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

PC software maker Soluto has launched a new tool called Quick Question that makes it easier than ever to ask a friend or family member for tech help.

Quick Question solidifies Soluto as a company dedicated to defeating PC frustration with crowdsourcing. Its software already makes it easy for a tech-savvy person to support someone who needs computer help. Now with Quick Question, PC users that need help with their tech can just press the F8 key and Soluto will send a screenshot and the problem to the tech-savvy friend.

“The Quick Question feature revolutionizes the way we help each other solve our computer headaches,” Soluto CEO Tomer Dvir said in a statement. “With a strike of the F8 key, a Soluto user can show the problem to a friend or colleague who can respond immediately with an answer or fix the problem remotely. No more time is wasted explaining problems on the phone or over long email threads — the person with the problem doesn’t even have to be at the computer while the issue is solved.”

On top of launching Quick Question, Soluto has also released data on how often PC users call others for help and what issues they most struggle with. The survey of more than 1,400 computer users showed their biggest frustration to be setting up and supporting new devices like printers and smartphones.

Other big problems for these survey respondents included “slow PCs and crashes” (23.7 percent), “viruses” (18.5 percent), and “connecting to the Internet” (14.1 percent). These users contacted their tech-savvy friends or family a few times a month with their computer issues. The survey indicates why the new Quick Question feature could be especially useful.

Tel Aviv, Isreal-based Soluto has raised $18.3 million in funding to date. Investors include Index Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Giza Venture Capital, and Proixma Ventures.

Photo credit: Soluto

Collins was the first dictionary publisher to use newfangled “computer databases” to help  manage words both new and old, way back in 1979. Today the editor-and-lexicographer-reviewed dictionary is crowdsourcing at least part of the work: spotting new words.

“We want to invite everyone into the process,” Alex Brown, head of digital for Collins, told VentureBeat this morning.

So, since mid-July, Collins has been accepting submissions for new words on its website — and offering daily prizes for the best efforts.

Source: Collins

Collins’ most recent prize was a pair of “mantyhose.” You have been warned.

Many of the new words lean heavily to the technology industry, with submissions such as livestreaming, superphone, cyberstalking, and tweeps.

Others seem to take inspiration from economic and political life: Eurogeddon, trendfear, and Dollargeddon.

If you submit a word and it is accepted, you will be credited, says Brown. And, if you used the site’s Facebook social login, your friends will know that you were responsible for the inclusion of a new word in the dictionary.

But editors and lexicographers will weigh in with their opinions before a word is accepted, though other users’ comments and responses to new suggestions are taken into account.

“On the site you can watch the review process,” says Brown. “You can see the status update — it’s a much more transparent process.”

To determine if a new word will be accepted, Collins lexicographers use the Collins Corpus, a 4.5 billion-word compilation of text from all over the English-speaking world … and, of course, Google. The goal is to ascertain whether a word is in wide enough circulation to be added — and whether the word is established enough to have some longevity.

Many do not get accepted. “Mobydickulous” — ridiculous to an epic degree – is a recent reject. “Tebowing” is on the edge … it may or may not make the cut.

(I didn’t ask about Linsanity.)

But already about 50 words are looking like good candidates for inclusion. Examples include crowdfunding, binging (like googling, but different), and sexting. See a full list of the new words below, along with others that are more amusing than serious submissions.

“About 10% are probably good suggestions that will go in,” Brown says.

The company says that social media and blogging are changing language faster and faster. But, perhaps astonishingly, they are not converging all English dialects and words together. I asked about that.

“You would have thought that,” Brown said in response. “But from the UK and Ireland we’ve had just loads of regional words that we thought were dying out.”

One example: chummeling … which apparently is a word mothers in parts of the UK use to to refer to kids eating their food really noisily.

“Apparently, people are sort of passionate about their local words and local culture,” says Brown.

Are you? If so, suggest your own words here.

Candidate Words likely to go into the dictionary

Please note the definitions below are the user-suggested definitions.

Twittersphere
“the world of Twitter where communication is only via tweets”

captcha
“a challenge-response test on web forms to determine whether the user is human”

webliography
References made for updating knowledge by internet or digital media for research study.

tweetup
A real-life meeting organized on the social networking site Twitter

Sexting
Texting explicit sexual comments

Hyberconnectivity
The state of being constantly connected to people and systems through devices such as smartphones, tablets, and computers – and sometimes through software that enable and promote constant communication.

bridezilla
informal word A woman whose behaviour in planning the details of her wedding is regarded as obsessive or intolerably demanding

binging
like Googling, but with Bing instead of Google

crowd funding
A project or resource that is funded by users or supporters who pool their money together, usually via internet donation sites.

Superphone
One of the latest generations of phones with more powerful, high-speed processors

Sweatworking
Networking while at the gym.

Cyberstalking
The act of stalking someone online.

Some Interesting & Amusing Words Suggested by Users

These may or may not make it in to the dictionary.

Bashtag
A mean or rude comment sent on Twitter.

reBay
to buy something on eBay and immediately put it back up for auction.

mobydickulous
Ridiculous on an epic scale

mantyhose
Tights for men

Creeping
Pursuing women in a night club.

Tebowing
To get down on one knee as if praying.

Photobombing
Appearing at the back of someone else’s photograph without them knowing, so they are surprised when they see the photo.

Image credit: Collins

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Just in time for the Summer driving season, driving app Waze is today embarking on bold new territory: crowdsourcing the best gas prices.

With the latest version of the free Waze app, launching today, you’ll be able to find gas stations and compare their prices in real time. Even better, the company is offering exclusive gas discounts to users at participating stations. Waze also announced that it has reached 19 million users.

Waze’s apps, which are available on the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian phones, offer free turn-by-turn directions. But Waze’s true value is its vast amount of live traffic data. Crowdsourced entirely from its users, the data makes Waze a far more useful alternative to standalone GPS units.

Cheap gas apps like Gas Buddy and Fuel Finder have been around for some time, but Waze has the advantage of integrating its gas info alongside GPS routes.

Gas information is Waze’s first vertical attempt outside of its core crowdsourced navigation feature. Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s VP of platform and partnerships, said the company will slowly begin to explore other verticals as well.

Waze has also finally added the ability to use waypoints on your trips, allowing you to plot more than one location for a single journey. The company also has brought its nifty voice control feature to Android phones with this latest update.

Waze is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and has raised over $55 million thus far.

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s army of pieceworkers, ready to help you blend computation with human tasks in web apps.

What I didn’t know is that MTurk is also a powerful tool for testing and refining ideas. I learned this while interviewing Dan Shapiro onstage at the Founder Showcase last week.

Shapiro is a remarkably successful entrepreneur. His second startup, Sparkbuy, was acquired by Google just six months after he launched it.

That’s after a successful go with his first startup, Ontela, which merged with Photobucket in 2009. That company took a relatively pokey four years to arrive at an exit. Of course, by most people’s standards, four years would be plenty fast.

But what makes Shapiro’s approach to starting companies so interesting is the thorough, pragmatic approach he takes to market testing.

“I’m always skeptical when I get too in love with an idea,” Shapiro told me.

So when he had an idea for making it easier to find and compare electronics on e-commerce sites, he turned to Mechanical Turk to test and refine the plan.

(It also helped that a Google business development executive he met on a plane expressed interest in the idea, but “that was just a tiny, positive indicator in the grand scheme of things,” Shapiro said.)

Mechanical Turk, a project Amazon.com started in 2005, is a brilliant fusion of human labor and programmatic computation. Using it, you can incorporate human effort into your web-based software simply by making an API call. It’s no surprise that entrepreneurs are excited about using MTurk as a low-cost way of recruiting help, particularly for repetitive tasks.

But it’s also a great, low-cost tool for doing surveys, and that’s exactly what Shapiro did.

The first part of his surveys is always the set of eight questions from the U.S. Census. That helps him determine demographics and figure out how “normal” his respondents are.

Then he follows up by asking them a ton of questions.

First, Shapiro asked 100 people to describe a laptop as if their friend was going to buy it for them. Then he analyzed the responses, categorized all the words they used, and did a second survey to measure how important each of those words were. After that, he did follow-up interviews.

What Shapiro found was that the #1 criterion for laptop shoppers was price (no surprise there). But the #2 criterion was quantity of RAM, which was a bit surprising because it is an unusually geeky metric. Who really cares how much RAM their notebook has, after all, except really techie people? After doing some interviews, he realized that what people really wanted was speed, but there was no way on electronics sites to specify “I want a laptop that’s fast enough to run PhotoShop.”

Using these answers from a series of surveys, Shapiro was able to craft a business plan for a company that would let you shop for laptops based on criteria people actually care about, such as the ability to run PhotoShop, or weight, or color. What’s more, he knew from his market research that these were the criteria customers would be most likely to respond to, so his business idea was essentially pre-tested.

“I love MTurk,” Shapiro said.

He also used MTurk in the course of business, not just for business plan testing. For example, Sparkbuy’s database of laptop attributes was built in part by an army of “Turkers.” And at Ontela, he’d put out surveys with 100 or more questions about the wireless industry, using them as a valuable market research tool.

The price is almost ridiculously low. Shapiro said he would pay about 26 cents apiece for people to answer these 100-question surveys.

Shapiro’s not a solitary genius — others, particularly academics, have discovered the value of using MTurk in research. In 2009, someone named Alex Frakking described in detail how he used Mechanical Turk for conducting surveys. He paid a bit more: about 3 cents per survey question, in an attempt to keep the hourly rate between $8 and $12.

Frakking makes an interesting point, which is that the very people who fill out your survey on MTurk might turn into some of your earliest customers. You can make that easier by letting them opt-in to a mailing list so you can contact them when you launch. “In the last big survey I did, about 20 percent of respondents gave their email for just that purpose, meaning the survey can pay for itself in leads,” Frakking concludes.

Are Mechanical Turk surveys statistically valid? Absolutely — or at least as valid as phone or website surveys.

“The funny thing is,” Shapiro told me onstage, “if you actually look at the methodologies behind the way everyone else does it, it’s just the same.”

In a 2010 study, researchers compared surveys done with MTurk to those done using the traditional sociological pool, Midwestern university students, and with people found on Internet discussion boards. MTurk compared favorably.

The study concluded “experimenters should consider Mechanical Turk as a viable alternative for data collection,” although it warned that subjects are susceptible to the same kinds of experimental bias found in other arenas. The takeaway: Design your surveys carefully.

Also, the authors warn, unlike undergraduates, MTurk workers aren’t replaced with a new crop every few years, so there’s the potential for long-term relationships between surveyers and those surveyed. So don’t be a jerk: Treat your survey respondents right and they’ll be there for you, potentially for years.

For people who are interested in following Shapiro’s lead, there’s an open-source set of tools for doing MTurk surveys, called Lime Survey. And IT World published a detailed list of tips on running experiments or surveys on MTurk.

The rest of my discussion with Shapiro covered topics such as who should raise venture capital (not everyone), his experiences selling Sparkbuy and merging Ontela and Photobucket, and his thoughts on crowdfunding. It’s worth a listen. The whole 30-minute interview is below.

Mechanical Turk image: Wikipedia

The crowd filtered into the theater, and Kirill Shenykman, a venture capitalist who had recently led a $2 million investment in CrowdControl, took the stage. “What we are trying to do is to transform human labor into something that scales like software,” he explained. “We’re trying to take people and make them into bits.”

A few, dark chuckles went through the crowd. With his deep voice, slight Russian accent, and coiffed silver hair, Shenykman seemed like a bit of a James Bond villain describing a master plan for world domination. “I don’t mean that in a negative way, a diminutive way,” Shenykman said, waving his hand. “But just as Amazon can provide computing power on demand to a growing startup, we want to be able to offer an elastic marketplace for human labor.”

CrowdControl takes large complex jobs and breaks them into tiny pieces, then sources the piecework out to millions of micro-task workers around the world.

The company’s founder, Max Yankelevich, joined Shenykman onstage. “What we are doing is tapping into the world’s cognitive surplus,” he said, referencing a concept first laid out by digital intellectual Clay Shirky. “When you stop to think about the amount of brain power we have on demand, it’s kind of staggering. If we wanted to, with all the available excess on hand, we could recreate Wikipedia from scratch in a single day.”

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The star of the show that night was Mechanical Turk, a service Amazon initially created in 1995 to deal with its own problems sorting its massive inventory.

“We came at it programmatically from every angle we could think of, but it wasn’t working,” said Heidi Bretz, a business development manager at Amazon. “We would have a pair of red shoes listed on the site, with a description for a red sofa, priced like a different pair of rouge shoes. It was a mess.”

Eventually the company conceded that there is some work that humans are simply better at doing than machines. So Amazon decided to offer the work up to its customer base. They would post a job to their site — sorting the color of shoes or types of chandeliers — and web users from around the world picked up the work, often for just a few pennies per chore. The result was such a success that Amazon decided to open up the marketplace to other companies. “When things work internally, we like to turn around and sell them as a tool,” said Bretz.

The name for this platform came from The Turk, a chess-playing automaton which cut a swathe through the ranks of 18th century gamers in Europe and America. It was only decades later that this brilliant thinking machine was later revealed as a hoax: a chess master hidden inside a box. Amazon’s system attempts a similar sleight of hand, organizing people from across the globe to work as efficiently as a giant machine.

“The idea is you might sit down to a computer, log onto the web, order up a task, just as you would with any other piece of software,” says Prof. Rob Miller, who works on crowd computing at MIT. “You get the data back, all without ever realizing there was a human being on the other end of that transaction.”

Anyone can put a HIT — human intelligence task — onto Mechanical Turk, and anybody else can do the work. But the complexity in this kind of system was limited. “They should call them SHITs,” Shenykman, the investor. “Stupid Human Intelligence Tasks. With CrowdControl, we’re going to go much further.”

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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

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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 data in their traffic reports for months, including KABC Los Angeles, KGO-TV San Francisco, and KFAA Dallas.

Waze’s free apps, which are available on the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian phones, offers free turn-by-turn directions. But Waze’s true value is its vast amount of live traffic data. Crowdsourced entirely from its users, the data makes Waze a far more useful alternative to standalone GPS units.

“We’re thrilled to officially offer up our citizen traffic reporting to broadcasters,” Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze vice president of partnerships and platforms, said in a statement today. “We’re learning that the best local stations work at startup speed, so we can get each station up and running seamlessly in just under a week.”

Waze says it’s providing tools specifically for broadcast stations, including the ability to create branded commuter groups within its apps. This lets broadcasters directly communicate with their viewers, allowing for things like contests to choose a specific user’s traffic report. Waze says that ABC7 in Los Angeles has nearly 3,400 active members in its commuter group. While on-air, traffic reporters use an iPad to get access to Waze’s live data.

The company also announced that its apps are now being used by over 9 million commuters. That’s a jump of 2 million users since October, when Waze announced it raised an additional $30 million in funding. Clearly, the company has been growing like wildfire over the past few years, and this jump to powering TV traffic reports will only further its popularity among mainstream users. Once viewers see what Waze’s free apps can offer, they’ll have a hard time resisting the siren call.

Waze is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and has raised over $55 million thus far.

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 uTest Express for Web, which helped uTest expand its scope beyond mobile apps. At that time, uTest CMO Matt Johnston said his company’s growth had been forty-fold from two years ago, and four-fold from 2010 to 2011.

The new funding round was led by QuestMark Partners, with participation from all of uTest’s prior investors, including Scale Venture Partners, Longworth Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital. QuestMark Partner Tim Krongard will join uTest’s Board of Directors as well.

“The market’s adoption of uTest’s services has been amazing — particularly among retailers, media companies, gaming firms and agencies,” said uTest CEO Doron Reuveni, in a statement. “Given the ever-increasing demands by users that a company’s apps work flawlessly under real-world conditions, the opportunity before uTest is massive. This latest round sets us up to help even more companies, developers and testers launch apps that their users love.”

The Boston-based company was founded in 2007. The company’s total funding, including today’s new round, amounts to more than $37 million. The company said its valuation has more than doubled since its third round of funding 15 months ago.

We talked to Wright about HiveMind earlier this week in an exclusive interview, but we also thought it would be great to show you Wright’s own words, as he has a HiveMind like no one else. Here’s an edited transcript.

VentureBeat: Why don’t you start by telling me about where you are with HiveMind?

Will Wright: We have been exploring all this stuff with the Stupid Fun Clubs, and we really started diving into this idea over six months ago. And really this has to do with where gaming is going in the future. This is one of these things where we want it to be totally focused and have it be something that we can scale up in a big way. We are actually planning to launch this as a separate company entirely, a spin out from the Stupid Fun Club.

VB: Tell us about it.

WW: The gist of it is, we are trying to do what I am kind of calling personal gaming. We have had different eras in gaming like console gaming and social gaming. This isn’t really a platform-based concept, although a lot of  it will be happening on mobile devices. A big part of it is how can we learn enough about the player to start crafting games about their real life. Rather than craft a game like FarmVille for players to learn in play, we learn about you and your routines and incorporate that into a form of game play. Rather than put you in a fictional sand box, how do we make a game about the things that you do all the time?

It is something that is with you all the time, especially with your real life, almost like you are Sim. Your regular routines, your locations, your friends can all be incorporated into a form of game play. And a big part of this really, I think, is how do we make reality more interesting to you. What we are saying is, how do make a game that gets you more engaged in reality rather than distract you from it? And so we use reality as the basis of the game play and a lot of these opportunities that surround you.

I had this epiphany about a year ago. I was in Burbank and I was waiting to give a talk and I was about an hour early and I walked  down the street. There was like this old fifties diner. I had an hour to kill, so I just walked  down there because I liked the sign. In the parking lot were all these guys with really cool sports cars. They were sitting on lawn chairs. I asked what they were doing, and it turned out that the last Friday of the month, these guys would get together in the parking lot and just bring their cars and sit and talk about cars. And I love cars, so I had a great time just walking around talking to these guys looking at their cars. And it occurred to me later that my life is probably surrounded with possibilities like this, opportunities that I am just not aware of. There is this opportunity space that surrounds me. If I understood the things that were accessible to me, if I knew about these events, my life would probably be a lot more interesting.

And that’s kind of the concept here. How do we expose you to these events? How can we make a system that understands enough about you and gives you really deep situational awareness? It could take into account what time of day it is, where you are, how much money is in your pocket. Imagine if you could open Google Maps and it shows you things that are interesting to you on the map.

These things might be of tremendous interest to you. It might be an event, it might be a place, its might be some historical footnote, it might be some person that you went to high school with. Whatever it is, all these things that you trip across serendipitously — how can we make a system? All of these things are very different dimensions that this kind of matchmaking would occur through. Are you following me so far?

VB: Yeah. It’s interesting.

WW: Another way to look at this is like in mapping software. Google Maps will show you where are in two dimensions, and it can show you what’s near by geographically. But when you think about the things that really kind of moderate your interest or your accessibility or availability to different experiences or opportunities, there are a lot more dimensions to that map. There’s probably at least like 50 dimensions in that map. And those dimensions would be things like your interests, your social network, the time of day. All of the factors that I talked about you can envision as other dimensions on a much higher dimensional map.

And so one of the things we want to do is be able to triangulate a player in those 50 dimensions plus have a deep map of the world on these dimensions. And there will be a lot of data in there that’s not even up on the cloud yet. We want to build a game and entertainment activities that can actually help us build a 50-dimensional map and locate the players in it. And then we use that opportunity space for really interesting new forms of entertainment. It might blur entertainment, lifestyle and personal tools. With that data, the world and the opportunities for entertainment become more visible to you. A part of this is really getting a deep relationship with the user, really understanding a lot about them and even designing games to where we are actually specifically trying to learn aspects of the user that are not really captured by anybody else. It may capture issues with their psychology, their interests, their background, their history, their social networks, etc. We can use those to build a number of different gaming applications around you.

This suite of gaming applications is basically harvesting this 50-dimensional map.

VB: So are there some examples of this idea that do bits and pieces of this in the real world already? Even the simple idea of location-based mobile search seems like it could deliver some of this data to you.

WW: A couple of things I’ve seen in the last month or so are these dating apps, where it’s looking for somebody that matches your interests that also happens to be within a quarter-mile of you. So in that case it’s looking at maybe five dimensions. Not just where you are, but also looking for people around you that have shared interests. That’s a very simple example of something like that; there have been a lot of location-based things that have a very thin game layer on top of them, like Foursquare. Those really started out as utility tools or mapping services, where the people who were working them were technology driven, and they don’t really go deep into gaming psychology. So they will put in an achievement ladder and that’s that. That’s the game, which is where Foursquare is.

We’re looking at how we build much deeper, more involving gaming experiences. But we build them out of the real world rather than the fantasy worlds.

VB: What are some examples of those 50 dimensions you’re talking about?

WW: Oh, we’ve got lists. You can imagine a lot of them. Imagine anything that would describe the things that would be of interest or available to you at any specific time and location. So your location is obvious, the time of day is another one, your interests, your skills, people, how much money is in your pocket, what your current mood is, which is actually a very important one. We wanted to design a gaming application that in some sense can start tracking and predicting your mood and even your schedule. It can understand when you go to work, when you have lunch, what times you are free that day. It can have access to your schedule and know what you have planned for the rest of the day.

These are all things that would be specific to you that will triangulate you on the 50-dimensional space. The map is the rest of that space and is basically showing you a proximity to other things, but any parameter about you — a lot of it really involves deeply personal stuff like your mood, state of mind, your schedule and stuff like that. But over time we want to extract this stuff out so that we know you are into a very specific set of things. We might know that other people are into very similar kinds of specific things, and we can track what they’ve done. We can match those interests and then recommend them to you.

We can kind of go with those 50 dimensions — and 50 is really just a number I pulled out of a hat. It’s just the way I think about building out a profile of a user.

VB: So it almost seems like doing some data mining and then building the game around that?

WW: Well, it’s actually almost the opposite process. We want to build games that allow us to mine that data. I have all these apps where they ask stuff like, can I use your location. I usually say no. That’s actually a generational thing. I have noticed how many people who are like 20’s and 30’s have much less concern about privacy relating to apps. One of the things we have to be really cognizant of is that we want to basically get the user on our side in that, any time they share data with us, they immediately get value back. They get entertainment back. And so we reward them heavily for every bit of data they give to us about themselves. And that’s crucial and we will again have different types of gaming apps, but almost every one of them in some sense wants to contribute to data mining, either mining data about you individually or mining data about the world around you.

So in the example I gave about when I was down in Burbank, the fact that these guys meet in that parking lot the last Friday of every month — maybe that’s posted on a web site somewhere, but it’s not in Google Maps. It is things like that we want to basically make accessible within our 50-dimensional map. It is the data we want to capture so that somebody might be playing a game where they are trying to recommend things for me. My friends are kind of playing me like a Sim. And they can see my current needs. They can see how bored I am or how tired I am and they are competing to give the best recommendation to me. And the ones that give  me the best recommendation earn “karma points.” They get more attention focused on them, basically for making my life more interesting.

But as they are doing that, as they are giving me these suggestions, we are also capturing the data into the map and retaining it for later, so it might be several months later some other guy is standing on the corner and he is into cars and then the system understands somebody once suggested that these guys meet in the parking lot on the last Friday of every month. I am going to reuse that recommendation. And so this is an example of how we start building the data set out of entertainment experiences.

VB: Sounds like you are sort of bringing a Sim to life here.

WW: Kind of. In a way. But we are really kind of making it a real-life endeavor. A lot of it is going to be not just this system and you but it’s also going to be getting your friends involved. Have you ever seen the sort of sub-community that has sprung up lately in the Bay Area called the “quantified self“?

VB: Yes. Isn’t Gordon Bell of Microsoft into that as well?

WW: Yes. These people build these elaborate data sets on their personal life, and they look for patterns or insights. They share them. Most people are doing their own data sets or counting calories or figuring out how much time they spend doing email or whatever the weird thing is they love, basically capturing metrics about themselves and then figuring out how to interpret the data. And that’s exactly what we want to do. People in general are very narcissistic, and so the more we can make this whole thing about you, the more we can get people emotionally attached to it. And so this is kind of back to the idea that we make the game out of you and your life and so, intrinsically, your gaming experiences should be as interesting to you as your dreams, because they are going to be deeply personal.

VB: Yeah.

WW: And so that’s kind of what brought us to start thinking of this as what we are calling personal gaming. How do we make games that really are about you and your life?

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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 gaming that Wright calls “personal gaming.” It is a game that can customize itself for the individual player, taking into account aspects of player’s real-life situation as elements of the game.

It’s not an easy concept to understand, particularly because Wright isn’t describing the game in detail yet.

“Rather than craft a game like FarmVille for players to learn and play, we learn about you and your routines and incorporate that into a form of game play,” Wright said.

He noted, for instance, that there may be 50 different dimensions to a person that could be learned through data collection. Some of those dimensions could be location-based, like where you are, where your friends are, and how much money is in your wallet. It may sound like a creepy invasion of your privacy for game to know that about you, but Wright wants to emphasize the entertainment value of sharing and why people will probably share that information gladly.

Wright’s inspiration came last year when he went down to Burbank, Calif., to give a talk and showed up early. He wandered down the street to a 1950s-style diner. There, he found a bunch of car enthusiasts who gather on the last Friday of each month to show off their cars. A car buff himself, Wright had a great time talking to those people. It was random luck, but quite entertaining.

“If I knew about these events, my life would be a lot more interesting,” he said. “How do we expose you to these events, these things? How can we make a system that understands enough about you and gives you situational awareness? It could take into account what time of day it is, where you are, how much money is in your pocket. Imagine if you could open Google Maps and it shows you things that are interesting to you on the map.”

Wright’s idea with HiveMind is to collect data so that the game can discover opportunities for a person to have fun, directing the person to the right place where they could enjoy themselves, based on their interests. If the HiveMind knew enough about Wright, for instance, it could have found that gathering of car experts for him.

“It is about how we make reality more interesting to you,” Wright said.

Harvesting data to entertain you

Although he realizes many people are guarded about privacy, he notes that the younger generation is more comfortable sharing information about themselves. And they will willingly share it if they could be virtually guaranteed a great deal of entertainment in return. If you entice people with enough game-oriented entertainment, they won’t mind sharing that information, he said.

What Wright hopes to do is harvest a bunch of data and then use that to suggest ways to entertain a person. Once HiveMind gathers this kind of data on a lot of people, it could go into a kind of matchmaking service, as happens with sites that collect dating information. HiveMind could mine the data and discover useful things about its players.

“It blurs entertainment, lifestyle, and personal tools,” Wright said. “With that data, the world and the opportunities for entertainment within it become more visible to you.”

“If we can learn enough about the player, we can create games about their real life,” Wright said. “How do we get you more engaged in reality rather than distract you from it?”

Once again, as he has done so many times in his career, Wright is talking about a kind of game that has never been done before.

“This has to do with where gaming is going,” Wright said. “We had our eras in console gaming and social gaming. A lot of this personal gaming will happen on mobile devices. The question here is how can we learn enough about the player to create games about his or her real life.”

The inspiration for this game also came in part from researchers who are talking about “a quantified self,” where they gather everything about their life and behavior and store it in digital form. Researchers like Gordon Bell of Microsoft, who created a project called MyLifeBits, believe they can gain self knowledge by recording their lives in minute detail.

Examples of this include fitness programs like Nintendo’s Wii Fit, where you can measure your daily exercise progress, as well as more recent fitness measurement devices from Basis (pictured) and Striiv. The basic principle behind these fitness devices is gamification, or making a non-game activity more fun by using game mechanics.

But Wright doesn’t want to limit HiveMind to something like fitness. What if, for instance, an application could tap into something as personal as your dreams? That suggestion is way out there, but it is intriguing.

Nor does Wright want to limit his scope to something like augmented reality (layering digital data on the real world), or Foursquare, which gives people achievements when they check into locations.

Such applications might know a few dimensions about a person, but they just don’t go deep enough into gaming psychology, which could really motivate a person to do something. Here, the games will enable HiveMind to mine data about a person.

Wright said it wasn’t a requirement that you have to be near someone playing the same game as you. He called that the “density problem,” something that augmented reality games run into all the time. Augmented reality companies can create multiplayer games, but there might only be one other player within 20 miles of you. Wright said his game won’t rely on players needing to be near each other to play.

Turning to others for problem solving

One of the elements of the game goes back to The Sims. In that game, the artificial intelligence was built into the objects around the simulated people, rather than the people themselves. The objects would advertise themselves to the Sim, which had to fulfill its needs in the order of most urgency. The Sim turns to the object that fulfills the most urgent need.

In his new game, Wright said, you might turn to your friends to help fulfill your needs. They could send messages to you that try to get you to do something that you need to do. In that sense, your friends could help you accomplish some of the things that you want to do in real life. That is a kind of crowdsourcing, where lots of people contribute ideas to solve a big problem, and it is one of the things that the internet is great for.

The internet essentially operates like a “hive mind” when a problem needs solving. And that is why Wright is calling the new company HiveMind. He thinks that collectively, people can help individuals solve problems.

That idea reminds Wright of a sci-fi story by Bruce Sterling called Maneki Neko, named after Japanese gift cats. The story is about the “gift economy” where people contribute gifts to strangers and in return get back everything that they need. People can earn “karmic points” that can be redeemed, a common feature of social games on Facebook.

Wright sees this vision for a game as the logical extension of his game career. He moved from simulating and solving the problems of cities with SimCity to solving individual or family problems with The Sims. Now he is moving not toward solving the problems of a simulated person, but solving the problems of a real person while entertaining them too.

“When you look at the arc of the games I have done, starting from SimCity, they are each mining a deeper level of creativity,” Wright said. “And they are more focused on the individual over time.” Hence, Wright is now in the age of personal gaming, where the “user becomes the game.”

Wright said the ideas percolated over the past six months while he was mulling things over at his other startup, the Stupid Fun Club. That company is more like an idea generator and a think tank, not an operational company. HiveMind’s three founders include Wright, serial entrepreneur Raj Parekh, and game finance expert Jawad Ansari.

Details on the funding for the company, its schedule for releasing games, and other matters will be released over time. The game could be staged on a mobile devices or Facebook, and other game platforms as well.

It is possible that the HiveMind game will interact with other ideas coming out of the Stupid Fun Club, including an unannounced TV show that is in the works based on a Stupid Fun Club idea, Wright said.

Wright is hoping that his announcement today will trigger interest from like-minded developers who have been thinking about the same thing. He plans to scale up the HiveMind business and make it into a big operation with lots of talent, building apps, a back-end system, and anything else needed to make the HiveMind a reality.

“We want to do this in a very big way,” Wright said.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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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, raising money to donate 99 sandwiches per day to feed the protesters.

But Prosper’s own platform has the power to do more than donate sandwiches. It could shake up the banking industry at large, if its model catches on.

“Everybody knows that banking is broken, the system is broken,” Prosper co-founder and chief executive officer Chris Larsen told VentureBeat at Crowdconf, a crowdsourcing conference in San Francisco, today. “There’s no reason with the technology we have today, all this great stuff, that you couldn’t completely rewire banking in five years.”

That’s a bold claim.

Prosper makes it possible for individuals to lend out money and earn interest  on the money they lend, which has been the sole province of banks. But the reason this was not possible before wasn’t lack of technology, but because of regulations meant to protect banks.

If successful, Larsen thinks that the future of the banking industry could be Silicon Valley, not Wall Street.

“You need banking, but you don’t need banks,” said Larsen.

In order to launch his company, Larsen invested $10 million and spent five years fighting through a bramble of regulations meant to protect banks and stifle innovation. As evidence of the banking industry’s hold over the political system, Larsen pointed out that there are 61 members of the House Committee on Financial Services, the legislative entity that governs banking and finance. He said that there are perhaps two startups that exist today that are able to charge interest on peer-to-peer transactions, out of as many as 100 that were started around the same time as Prosper.

In a recent blog post, “Why Hasn’t a Facebook of Banking Emerged,” Larsen implored anti-Wall Street protesters to use new technologies to support the movement, and support innovation.

…[W]hile it’s important to keep up the demands for change, we also need you to start using these new technologies and spreading the word when you find one that excites you. Use a crowdfunding site to support a project, make a $25 bid on a peer-to-peer lending site. Start-ups are, well, start-ups, and every show of community support could make the difference between obscurity and escape velocity. Vote with your wallet.

This last point is an important one.

Larsen does, however, think there’s a role for banks in preventing their own demise, and he encourages them to make their infrastructure available to startups, as a platform for innovation.

“[Y]ou don’t have to just stand by and get pummeled….Even if these start-ups are tiny now and even if their stated mission is to destroy your franchise, partner with them. Technology is not going away, it’s accelerating with or without you. It’s time to stop cutting your R&D budgets and start embracing new, big ideas.

While Chase bank may have an iPhone app that allows customers to make deposits to their accounts by taking photos of checks, Larsen says this type of solution is “bolting on little pieces to a system that isn’t serving people well.”

Prosper has funded more than $271 million in person-to-person loans to date. As a startup, it has received $74.5 in investment from Jim Breyer of Accel Partners; Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Jerome Contro of Crosslink Capital, CompuCredit; Omidyar Network; Capital One Co-founder Nigel Morris of QED Investors; Court Coursey of TomorrowVentures and Larry Cheng of Volition Capital.

Larsen’s last company was eLoan, which he co-founded in 1998, and eventually took public.

Prosper is going to need luck, time and a lot of support if its going to have a chance of taking on the multi-trillion-dollar financial industry, which accounts for 7 to 8 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, twice as large a proportion as it commanded in the 1960s. Chances are slim that executives at banking giants like Citibank or Bank of America are worried much about Prosper, if they have even heard of it.

Such long odds don’t daunt Larsen, who has passion to push him forward.

“We’re in a crisis here. We have a yield-starved world, and we have a credit-starved world, which is kind of funky. That means banking is truly not working.”

Related articles

• Protestors block bank entrance, snarl traffic in San Francisco (venturebeat.com)
• Dylan’s Desk: Is it time to occupy Silicon Valley? (venturebeat.com)
• Lendio and Prosper.com Bring Personal Loans, Affordable Capital to Small Businesses (prweb.com)

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 Mireles wanted to build the API to solve a problem he ran into at his video-transcription company, SpeakerText. ”We launched SpeakerText, and it took us about a year and a half to get actual quality results from Mechanical Turk,” Mireles told VentureBeat. The problem, Mireles said, is that it was extremely difficult to ensure the quality of an anonymous, distributed workforce. For every dollar the team spent on labor on Mechanical Turk, it had to spend two dollars on quality assurance and cleanup. Everyone is trying to game the system, because there’s no accountability.

“Mechanical Turk is a marketplace with no sheriff,” Mireles said.

Humanoid operates like a good boss and does what bosses have done since the beginning of time, Mireles said. When someone is new, the boss pays closer attention to them and ensures that they’re producing quality work. As the quality improves, there is less need for scrutiny, and the employee can operate with more autonomy. This has never been possible before, because there wasn’t a software program focused on assuring quality.

“Businesses demand accuracy, and quality, but they can’t get it, because they have to manage the teams themselves,” Mireles said. In the case of SpeakerText, that meant hiring people to manage the quality of the work produced by the teams doing jobs from Mechanical Turk, a problem that is remarkarkably widespread.

Using statistics to predict how accurately a task will be completed based on a worker’s past performance, Humanoid is able to judge whether a worker is showing signs of fatigue, or if other factors could be interfering with the completion of a task. When these warning signs arise, the job is rerouted to another distributed worker who can meet the company’s standards, so no time is lost fixing work that is not up to snuff.

SpeakerText will live on as a feature of Humanoid and will continue to serve existing customers as needed. Mireles and team previously received funding from Mitch Kapor  and 500 Startups for SpeakerText. Humanoid has received funding from Google Ventures.

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, which lets site owners create guidelines for their translations, a Progressive Glossary, a continually updated collection of terms that translators can refer to, and complete search engine optimization (SEO) compliance for translated pages. Additionally, Smartling has added management tools for handling crowdsourced translators.

“Quality web translation should be available for any business, not just for major corporations with massive localization budgets,” Smartling CEO Jack Welde said in statement today. “With great feedback from our enterprise users, such as SurveyMonkey, we’ve simplified the traditionally complex and costly translation workflow and re-applied it for the pace of Web 2.0 businesses.”

The company offers a free level of site translation for up to 5,000 multilingual page views a month, and you can pay up to $249 a month for 100,000 translated page views. For more heavily trafficked enterprise sites, Smartling also offers custom plans.

Smartling recently announced integration with the website optimization company Cloudflare, which lets Cloudflare customers instantly translate their websites with the click of a button. Smartling currently provides translation services to companies like Foursquare, Kobo, and Threadless. The company competes directly with Cloudwords, another cloud-based translation service.

Smartling recently raised $10 million in funding, on top of a $4 million round from earlier last year. Investors include Venrock, First Round Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, and IDG Ventures.

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 order to round up a great list of products, the reviewer must first test each product, find and test competitors, categorize the products and finally write the review. There’s time cost, locating and acquiring the product cost and cost to pay someone to write the review. That all adds up. Top10 uses the cheaper favorite, crowdsourcing, to develop these lists almost instantly.

For Top10 to do this, users must first create their own top ten lists. The company then curates a list based on users’ predefined preferences found on their personal, topic-specific lists. For instance, a list of “Top 10 Pixar Movies” was aggregated from 67 different users who all created their own best of pixar lists.

Top10 was founded in 2011, to much concern that the product wouldn’t be able to hold up next to competitors. Dave McClure of 500 Startups showed his hesitance at the Launch Conference where Top10 was unveiled by saying that top 10 lists aren’t new and in order to succeed a company like Top10 will need great game mechanics.

Sonali De Rycker, a partner at Accel Partners, however, describes Top10 as solving a major pain point for consumers.

The company plans to use the funding to expand on its product, along with marketing and new hires.

Top10 company is headquartered in London. Other investors involved in this round include Founder Collective, Idealab, Forward Venture Partners and Shakil Khan.

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 essence, a chat service, with options for text, video and voice chats. The company installs a Needle button on its various product pages and assigns an “expert” to the page.

“You’re talking to the guy who actually rides mountain bikes, or who uses avalanche ski gear,” Morgan Lynch, chief executive of Needle told VentureBeat.

Needle crowdsources its representatives completely, but Lynch prefers to call it “fan sourcing.” According to him, Needle experts are people who are already visible on the internet and are passionate about a certain topic. They raise their hands, they blog, they go to forums. But they are not customer service representatives, and Needle doesn’t expect them to fill those shoes. Instead, they are dedicated to sales only, to show knowledge of a product and be able to point people toward other products as well.

One of those products is sportswear company Under Armour, which has already given Needle a boost in “expert” applications. When Under Armour put up a post on its Facebook page, Needle saw 120 applications to be the page expert within a few hours.

So, how do you scale a digital company so reliant on manpower? You pay in points. Needle has gone the way of gamification, and offers points to its experts that can used to buy products they chat about and like. This is a bonus for Needle as well.

“Points are potent because unlike games, [experts] can get more [physical] products and services. If you love active gear, you want more of that gear. That reinforces the passion for what they’re doing and makes them more knowledgeable.”

Needle’s first round of funding helped it scale its current product. Its investors included Josh James of Omniture, Adify co-founders Russell Fradin and Larry Braitman, as well as Lightbank, the venture firm created by Groupon’s co-founders.

“We’re investing the bulk of our technology just in managing people,” said Lynch, who mentioned that most of the company’s first round of funding went toward engineering, which he says is 75 percent of the company. “We’re very good at managing people in the cloud.”

Lynch also mentioned that the company is actively looking for a second round of funding, which he would like to use for marketing and exposure. The company already has interested investors. And with its gamification model and the new retail partners, Lynch is confident in his search for another round of funding and in the crowdsourcing product already.

“No one’s really cracked the code [on crowdsourcing]. A lot of people try doing stuff like this and there’s frankly a lot of dead bodies out there. But you have to have the right model to do it, and we have it.”