Posts tagged Crowdsourced
Trada Launches Crowdsourced Facebook Ads Marketplace
Nov 9th
Trada’s new crowdsourced Facebook Ads marketplace is designed to combat ad fatigue using the talent of their design and optimization pool to constantly optimize the best ad and image combinations possible. Facebook optimization experts and d…
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Google Maps Adds New Crowdsourced Maps of Afghanistan, Iraq & Elsewhere
Oct 7th
Google has just announced the latest class of countries to graduate from Google Map Maker and become full-fledged citizens of Google Maps. Map Maker allows “citizen cartographers” to add details like little roads, businesses and geographic features to parts of the world that Google’s staff can’t easily reach.
Today’s announcement incorporates community contributions from a bunch of new countries, territories, and even an entire continents into the live Google map. The graduates are: Afghanistan, Antarctica, Ecuador, Georgia, Guatemala, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Honduras, Iraq, Norfolk Island, Saint Pierre & Miquelon and Saudi Arabia.
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Google has strained under the weight of mapping the entire wold. After launching Map Maker to crowdsource the effort in 2008, it has steadily increased the importance of community contributions. In April, Google opened Map Maker in the U.S., a tacit admission that it can’t map all the locations and businesses itself, even in the world’s most wired places.
In September, the Google LatLong team even shifted some of the Map Maker approval process onto Regional Expert Reviewers from the community, rather than having staff moderate all changes.
The system has shown signs of strain. It took the Google Maps team two months to recognize South Sudan’s independence, despite a clamoring community. But Google has pressed forward with its effort to expand the global importance of Maps. In August, 40 new countries received localized top-level domains for Google Maps.
As curating Maps becomes a worldwide effort, crowd contributions from Map Maker will only become more important. Today’s large crop of graduates is a recognition of great work by a community of volunteers around the world.
Congratulations to the graduates!
For more before-after photos and videos, check out the Google LatLong Blog.
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Largest Telescope in the World to Rely on Crowdsourced Computing Power
May 30th
The largest telescope ever to exist (on this planet anyway) is going to be the Square Kilometre Array. The SKA will cost about $2.1 billion to construct. Australia and South Africa are bidding on the project. What may give Australia an edge is the way they intend to handle the massive computer processing and storage demands of the array. Crowdsourcing.
The crowdsourced computing initiative which those behind the Australia bid have put together will leverage personal computer power in lieu of extremely expensive petaflop supercomputers.
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Artist’s rendition of the Square Kilometre Array
Computerworld Australia describes the crowdsourcing project.
“The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), along with iVEC, the company running the $80 million high performance computing Pawsey Centre at CSIRO in Western Australia, are set to launch a ‘citizen science’ application this year based on the open source Nereus V Cloud computing technology developed at Oxford University. The application, dubbed “theskynet” by Australian researchers, would grant anyone not affiliated with the global telescope project access to the datasets formed out of the array’s work.”
By 2013, when it is fully up and running, the application should allow the Pawsey Centre to engage in petaflop computing. It will also make it the third-fastest supercomputer in the world, as well as possbily the largest cloud computing networks on the globe.
According to PopSci, the SKA will consist of 3,000 radio dishes, “spread as far as 2,000 miles in every direction from a central core, offering a full 1,000,000 square meters (that’s one square kilometer) of collection surface.”
There have been crowdsourcing projects already to help crunch the massive data that comes through various astronomical projects, most famously, the Seti@Home project, which began in 1999. Seti@Home is a radio telescope project to listen for signals that might come from intelligent life. It continues to this day.
Distributing computing and storage needs between institutional and personal computers is not a one-way street. In addition to saving money, saving heat and energy (using already-running computers), it will also provide datasets from the array to both scientists and members of the public willing to run the app on their rigs.
Australian radio telescope photo by Amanda Stater
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LawPivot: Crowdsourced, Confidential Legal Advice for Startups
Feb 10th
Questions about the legal requirements surrounding the establishment, incorporation or funding of a startup may be among the most common and most challenging that entrepreneurs face. There’s the general distrust of lawyers, alongside the sense – true or not – that legal advice will be too costly.
LawPivot tackles this problem by providing a place where companies, but especially startups, can ask legal questions and get crowdsourced answers from qualified lawyers. LawPivot aims to ease some of the obstacles – financial, but also logistical – that make finding a lawyer so difficult.
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The co-founders, Jay Mandal and Nitin Gupta, are both lawyers. Mandal was the lead of Apple’s mergers and acquisitions team, and Gupta was an IP attorney at a several national firms. They bring to the table, then, an understanding of the needs of entrepreneurs and lawyers, the latter of whom are finding their own profession changing and are needing new ways to develop their businesses.
How It Works
Unlike other Q&A sites, the questions you pose to LawPivot are confidential. You tag your questions with relevant keywords, which helps the site’s recommendation engine identify the best lawyers for the job. It’s the addition of recommendations and algorithms to this sort of online inquiry that LawPivot’s Gupta describes as “the next direction of Q&A.”
You can ask questions about a variety of legal topics that concern your startup: contracts, stock issues, employment, licensing, patents, trademarks, real estate, just to name a few. But when you tag your question and request a lawyer, you needn’t only do so based on subject matter expertise. You can indicate, for example, that you need someone who’s quick to respond.
You can then choose to send your question to the lawyers you choose or the ones LawPivot recommends, and you’ll get an email when a lawyer responds to your question.
Through the end of the month, LawPivot is free. And it’s restricted to questions that address California law (so, California companies and California lawyers.) The company, which just received a round of funding from Google Ventures, does plan to expand beyond California eventually (and if you’re a company outside of California who has a question about a California legal matter, you’re still welcome to sign up). Following its free trial period, LawPivot will charge companies on either a per question or per monthly basis.
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Buried in Snowmageddon 2010 Without a Shovel? Crowdsourced Sites Lend a Hand
Dec 27th
Has “snowmageddon” 2010 got you down? Did that snowplow make a wall of snow, ice and grime as tall as your SUV and you don’t have a shovel? Or are you just sick of sitting around the house?
Ushahidi, the crowdmapping tool originally developed to track elections in Kenya, has created two websites for both New York City and Boston to help with the clean-up, dig out stuck vehicles, and assist with impromptu snowball fights.
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In the past, you might have heard of Ushahidi being used for much more grave and serious purposes, such as when it was used to help coordinate emergency aid operations for Haiti earthquake victims.
The website offers a simple form to let users seek or offer help, providing a number of categories from “plows needed” to “cleanup party” to “snowblower available” and more. Simply pin point your location on the map, give it a title and description, and you’re good to go.
Ryan Ozimek, CEO of PICnet and the developer behind both clean-up sites, was also behind a similar effort last February in D.C.. He said that they were able to take the best practices from that site and roll out two sites for New York and Boston “in less than a few hours.”
“After the DC blizzard, we received some outreach from local governments that are looking to have systems readied for neighbor-to-neighbor first-responder type connections after a disaster or crisis,” said Ozimek. “With Ushahidi, any time you want to bring a community together to crowdsource incidents (time x place x activity), you’ll be using the right tool.”
Ozimek says PICnet has also been in talks with a major U.S. newspaper about using Ushahidi to plot the locations and times for non-profit volunteering opportunities, to make it easier for people to volunteer on a “drop-on” basis. The tool would make the connection between those looking to volunteer and those needing volunteers real-time.
So, if you have a car that’s impossibly snowed in or you just want to burn some of that energy that’s built up from being stuck inside for the last 24 hours, just head on over to SnowmageddonCleanUp for both NYC and Boston and see what your fellow city-dwellers have to offer.
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Crowdsourced SEO hits Sarkozy with Google Bomb – Vertical Leap News (press release)
Sep 8th
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Crowdsourced SEO hits Sarkozy with Google Bomb
Vertical Leap News (press release) However thanks to some mischievous crowdsourced SEO by thousands of bloggers and small publishers, you could also see Mr Sarkozy's facebook page rank in the … |
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Crowdsourced SEM “Marketplace” Trada Raises $5.75M From Google Ventures & Others
Jul 21st
Trada announced a $5.75 million “C” round this morning. It was led by Google Ventures and early investor Foundry Group. Trada CEO Niel Robertson told me yesterday that the money will be used for to get into display (and eventually video and mobile), as well as to expand into non-US markets and develop new tools [...]
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Crowdsourced SEM “Markeplace” Trada Raises $5.75M From Google Ventures & Others
Jul 21st
Trada announced a $5.75 million “C” round this morning. It was led by Google Ventures and early investor Foundry Group. Trada CEO Niel Robertson told me yesterday that the money will be used for to get into display (and eventually video and mobile), as well as to expand into non-US markets and develop new tools [...]
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***
View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
