Tag: CROWDSOURCING

Crowdsourcing unsolved codes has been done before. (Remember the San Francisco Chronicle appealing to the masses to crack the Zodiac killer's mystery missives?) But, it hasn't been done often by the FBI. So it is strange to see the Bureau open up a 12-year-old case, in which a man was found murdered with nothing but a bizarre note in his pocket, to the public. Perhaps the distance between the ...

We've selected our favorite and most promising Kickstarter projects, and spoke with the creators about why they deserve your time (and money). Check them out for yourself, and if these bright young things inspire you, maybe you can help launch their dreams into reality. Kickstarter doesn't have to be about changing the world -- the simple design of a well-crafted stylus may be groundbreaking ...

Jon Heder, of 'Napoleon Dynamite' fame, is working on a new project with writer and director Nick Peterson. The short film, tentatively titled 'Drained,' will combine live actors and stop-motion animation, and sounds like it's about how men are dirty, rotten bastards. (That, or it's about sewage.) What's interesting here, though, is that Heder and Peterson have turned to the Internet to help ...

Derek Lam's Fashion Week shows are always attended by the style elite. This season, Anna Wintour sat front row, near Joe Zee and Derek Blasberg, and, last season, Leighton Meester and Rachel Zoe watched the presentation. Throughout the years, Lam has become a hallowed part of New York fashion, like Donna Karan or Ralph Lauren. But for a part of his Spring '11 collection, Lam has decided to opt ...

Writers and directors sometimes implore the public to submit brief, incremental elements in order to build a larger story or movie. Brooklyn artist Clement Valla recently embarked on a similar crowd-sourcing project, called 'Seed Drawings,' but her goal was to construct living, evolving artworks. Valla initially created artistic building blocks, and then asked the public -- via Amazon Mechanical ...

Last July, renowned directors Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald implored the public to submit personal videos for a YouTube crowd-sourcing project titled, 'Life in a Day.' According to The Next Web, 1,125 submissions -- which were all captured on July 24th of 2010 -- eventually made the final cut. The finished product will reportedly debut January 27th at the upcoming Sundance Film Festival, but ...

Our favorite group of New York DIY aficionados set up a booth at a Pepcom event tonight, but not at CES itself. The Quirky crew did show all of its typical crowd-sourced wares, developed by their community of "influencers" (letting those with ideas make money, and change, in the realm of gadgetry), but Quirky had something rare to offer, too. Within the prior 24 hours, the team had built a ...

Microsoft wants to make a better spell check and it's willing to pay $10,000 to the person or persons that can "build the best speller that proposes the most plausible spelling alternatives for each search query." The Microsoft Speller Challenge officially launches on January 17, 2011. Eligible participants (over 18, not a Microsoft employee and not living in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or ...

Don't call it crowd-sourcing. It isn't quite that. It's not exactly social networking either, though the idea behind Moxsie's newest initiative does harness the large-scale power of Twitter and the populace voting capacity of groupthink. Moxsie, the Web retailer just shy of a two-year anniversary, features what CEO Jon Fahrner calls "under-sold, cutting edge" designers, looking for a Web space to ...

Yes. It's people. We get it. It's also a novel way of addressing complex writing problems. Soylent is an add-in for Microsoft Word that crowdsources tasks, like shortening copy and proofreading text, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk marketplace. You pay a small fee to enlist the hive mind to help you out. You can even assign complex tasks, like changing the tense of an entire paragraph. Video after ...

For many women, strolling down the streets of Cairo is no walk in the park. Whether it's in the form of catcalls, leers or gropes, sexual harassment has become increasingly common in Egypt, where strict social norms and widespread public negligence have offered little recourse to female victims. A forthcoming site called Harassmap, however, may provide Egypt's women with a new voice -- and, ...

If you saw the redesigned Gap logo last week and immediately had a reaction that bordered on complete revulsion, you're not alone. Customers and the Internet masses flooded the company's Facebook page with comments railing against the new logo, which had replaced the iconic blue box that has been the centerpiece of the Gap's branding for more than 20 years. In a statement released Monday, Gap ...

Share Even though the Facebook story seems far from over, David Fincher's 'The Social Network,' the first major motion picture to document the rise of Mark Zuckerberg and his creation, is hitting theaters this week. Facebook may have launched less than a decade ago, but the site has already burrowed its way so deeply into our collective consciousness that it's hard for many of us to imagine a ...

Want to know the average price of marijuana across the continent? PriceOfWeed crowdsources data from (obviously anonymous) users about their most recent sticky purchases, and handily displays the results on a Google map. Thanks to the 600 submissions in the week since its launch, we found out that weed is cheap in British Columbia and Oregon, and expensive in New York. Shocker? ...

Challenge.gov is a new site, created by the U.S. General Services Administration to serve as a one-stop shop for government-run contests, challenges and prizes. Federal agencies are able to post contests to the clearinghouse in an effort to increase visibility and increase citizen engagement. Most of the challenges offer prize money to citizens who are able to provide compelling content, such as ...