Erick Schonfeld


Crowdsourcing may work for Wikipedia, but few commercial companies have figured out how to make it work for them. The basic concept is to get outsiders, preferably customers, to swarm together to design a product or complete some other project. Crowdsourcing is quickly becoming a crowded field—there’s Innocentive, Cambrian House, the soon-to-launch CrowdSpirit, and Ideablob, to name a few sites. But Ben Kaufman, the CEO of a startup from Burlington, Vermont called Kluster, thinks that what is missing are market-like incentives to motivate contributors and push the best ideas forward.

Kluster, which is supposed to launch later today in a public beta and will be used by attendees at next week’s TED conference, is designed so that companies can offer cash rewards for each phase of a project. Participants who back the winning idea get to share the reward. Projects can range from creating logos and marketing campaigns to designing a product.

"The significant problems of innovation are solved only if
all participants realize some reward from their participation."
Professor Frank Piller

Putting pieces together: Lotus Mashups is a new product from IBM that aims to make it easy for people to build software applications by combining existing tools. For example (shown below), a user might combine an organizational map of a company with employee pictures, profile information from the company directory, and a database of files that each person can update. In this example, these features are wired together so that when a user clicks on one person’s picture, this action pulls up the directory information for that person and a list of his files.
Credit: IBM

Recently, the 2008 trend map has been published. It is derived from Shanghai’s underground routes. Limited to just five lines, the map uncovers key trends across Society, Politics, Demographics, Economy, and Technology. They position in form of a subway map the major trends in society, policy, technology, and economy and thus provide a fresh look on these themes. And in case you need any buzzword for your talk or paper, they are all there.

created by Nowandnext.com and Future Exploration Network

Ralf Reichwald und Frank Piller unter Mitarbeit von Christoph Ihl und Sascha Seifert: Interaktive Wertschöpfung. Open Innovation, Individualisierung und neue Formen der Arbeitsteilung. Gabler Verlag Wiesbaden, Juni 2006. Ca. 380 S., ISBN: 3-8349-0106-7, 24,90 EUR.

Free pdf download

Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also received his Ph.D. in 2005.
Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively channel human...

If you see this lady turning clockwise you are using your right brain.
If you see it the other way, you are using left brain.
Some people do see both ways, but most people see it only one way.

If you try to see it the other way and if you do see, your IQ is above 160 which is almost a genius. THIS IS NOT A JOKE. BOTH DIRECTIONS CAN BE SEEN.

CrowdSpirit is the 1st Electronic Community which enables you to decide which electronic products you would like to be able to purchase in your favorite electronic retailer.

Open Innovation ist laut dem bekannten Trendforscher Matthias Horx einer der grossen Trends von 2008. Die Berner Start-up-Firma Open Innovation GmbH ist mit einem Pilotprojekt, welches mittels Innovatoren-Community Unternehmen zu neue Ideen verhilft, ganz vorne dabei.

http://www.openinnovation.ch

Tommi Jaakkola



Game theoretic models in molecular biology
Tommi Jaakkola

How could we define a population on the Internet?
Gery

What is Life?