crowdsourcing

Crowdsourced videos, photos could aid Boston blast investigations

Law enforcement officials could have something very different on their hands as they investigate the dual bomb blasts that struck the Boston Marathon finish line today: a potential abundance of photo and video evidence from the public.

Government surveillance, while growing, still misses more than it catches. But events with thousands of spectators offer the potential for a detailed crowdsourced record of what happened.

This public panopticon is changing how we see the world. February's Russian meteor was captured by many dash-cams mounted in Russian cars, but in this case the event is of profound interest to law enforcement … Read more

Walmart to tap in-store customers to deliver to your home?

Walmart is considering doing something that most people would find extremely radical.

The company is in the early planning stages of a service that would see in-store customers rent space in their vehicles and their time to the mega-retailer to deliver products it sells online. The move would combat same-day delivery ideas from Amazon and reportedly what's in the works with Google, which might have already signed on Target for such a service.

According to Reuters, which spoke with Walmart representatives on the idea, people would order products online. Walmart would then tap in-store customers willing to deliver products … Read more

Mom crowdsources baby name for $5,000

Some decisions in life are very hard.

Which flavor of ice cream truly is your favorite? Should you eat goat's cheese rather than cow cheese because goats have beards? If you buy shoes with skulls on them, will someone think you're a necrophiliac?

And then there's naming your baby.

Some choose the easy way out. There are names handed down through their family, saving the need to buy baby-name books. Some try -- and even succeed -- to be creative, as was the case with my favorite Starbucks barista's mom who decided to name her little girl Kurshina.

Then there are those for whom it's all too much -- or something. They just wish someone else would take the decision and give them, say, $5,000.

That seems to be the case with 26-year-old Natasha Hill. She won a competition on the baby-naming site Belly Ballot for the privilege of having complete strangers choose her little one's name. (The little one is due in September.) … Read more

Egypt accused of crowdsourcing censorship

The Web has made it hard to censor things.

Principally because it is both so open and so Byzantine that there are simply so many things out there for a budding censor to sink his opprobrium into.

I can remember when I lived in Singapore and my NFL VHS's -- mailed to me from Switzerland -- were pored over by men and women with extremely sharp eyes and ears that became highly attuned to the sound of John Madden saying "Boom!"

So imagine how much hard work the world's online censors are having to do.

Egypt … Read more

How to make the most of your charitable donations

They call this the Giving Season, but there is no right or wrong time to help our neighbors in need, whatever corner of the world they call home.

Our hearts are heavy this holiday. There is no comprehending last Friday's tragedy in Connecticut. In our sorrow we reach out to the people who are suffering. These sites are dedicated to ensuring our contributions do as much good as possible.

Meet the students and teachers who benefit from your school donation Sometimes what appears to be a meager contribution can make a big difference in a student's life. That'… Read more

DARPA SpaceView enlists amateur astronomers

DARPA today announced a new approach to tracking the increasing population of space debris: crowdsourcing. The SpaceView program will reach out to amateur astronomers in helping to protect satellites from what NASA estimates is more than 500,000 pieces of hazardous space debris orbiting the Earth. It's a low-cost way to both improve the scope of the space coverage and better protect assets in space, some of which are satellites providing mission-critical combat support. Decomissioned satellites, spent rocket stages, aluminum oxide slag, and lost tools make up some of the half million pieces of debris -- and the Space … Read more

Can we please stop crowdsourcing the English language?

According to the Collins Dictionary, every word of the following paragraph qualifies as legitimate English:

"That oojamaflip zhooshing up the bang tidy K-pop on the banjolele is amazeballs! It's totally fandabidozi, but I'm just a fanboy who can't play squadoosh myself."

Nine of the words and phrases in the above two sentences come from the list of 86 new words, phrases, and senses (sort of like an additional definition for an existing word) that Collins added to its online dictionary as a result of an exhaustive crowdsourcing effort.

Now here's the mind-blowing part: those 86 new English words were chosen from a massive digital pile of more than 4,000 submissions sent in from the public.… Read more

Sony gets the crowd to shoot its Xperia Ion promo

More companies seem to be discovering that crowdsourcing is more than just a cheap way to have other people do your work for you, it's a cheap and potentially cool way. Or so the conversation likely went with Sony's marketing folks when they came up with the idea to demo the HD camera on the Sony Xperia Ion smartphone by creating a music video entirely from footage shot by a crowd full of the phones.

Sony got Metric, one of the bands signed to its recording label, to perform in a hotel penthouse and handed out 25 of the company's new LTE phones for the audience to film the one-take performance. … Read more

Life's meaning? Project crowdsources the big question

Marc Erlbaum has produced a movie starring Will Ferrell, and now he's ready for a little more heady project -- crowdsourcing the search for the meaning of life.

Erlbaum and his company, Nationlight Productions, were part of the team behind the acclaimed 2010 Ferrell flick "Everything Must Go," but for their latest project, they're turning to crowd-funding site Indiegogo and the whole of humanity rather than just Hollywood. While Erlbaum's team plans to make a documentary of their search for the meaning of life, that's not the main product Nationlight is looking to create through the campaign. Instead, here's how they describe the goal:… Read more