Late last night Jane McGonigal, the most respected authority in the world of gamification, Tweeted that she'd pitched in to support the creation of a new point and click adventure game from respected game development shop Double Fine. That was the first trickle I saw of what quickly became a flood of support for the Double Fine Adventure project on Kickstarter.
Long popular for their work building games with major studios, the Double Fine team decided they wanted to self-produce and document the creation of an old-fashioned point and click adventure game. They are probably just a few hours away from breaking $1 million raised from backers on Kickstarter, they are already the new record holders for the fastest to raise so much and to receive backing from so many individual funders. Update: Adding tens of thousands of dollars every 15 minutes, the project just passed $1m.
Darling of the crowdfunders, Kickstarter released its stats for the past year, and there is a lot of data to digest. The total number of projects is more than double from last year, the success rates for funding them is up slightly, and the total dollars pledged is close to a $100 million, which is more than triple what was pledged last year. Overall, more projects were able to meet their funding goals last year than all projects that were launched in 2009. With coverage on NBC's "Rock Center" news magazine and five of their funded films playing last year at Sundance, clearly they have come into their own.
Mocality, a Kenya-based crowd-sourced web and mobile business listings company, has accused Google of fraudulently stealing its customers. In a blog post today, Mocality's CEO Stefan Magdalinski maintained that Google has targeted its database, the core of its company, and lied to its users in an attempt to get them to join up with Google Africa's Getting Kenyan Businesses Online (GKBO) program.
Shortly after GKBO began in September, Mocality "started receiving some odd calls" from customers who were confused by pitches to build them websites that came from Google in apparent partnership with Mocality. There was no such partnership and Mocality claimed to discover it was Google lying to its customers to bring them into GKBO.
Google has released a statement which we have included at the end of the article after the jump.
OK, this isn't working anymore. Too many people either don't have a job or the ones that do are predominantly dissatisfied. We've been talking about networked organisations and distributed work for decades, but productivity gains have been dim the past ten years. Everything worked just well enough to not think about structural changes. We tried to apply collaboration and fancy search platforms like new paint on a crumbling house that could be fixed.
But because neither renovation nor innovation did catch up at the speed of our economic development, we crashed. And that's, like with every disrupting event, a tremendous opportunity. It forces us to rethink, because it pushes us beyond the tipping point we tried to avoid for so long.
What happens when the Recession Apocalypse has got you down? Get a couple of buddies together, call yourselves the Defenders of the Commonwealth and launch a $5 million Kickstarter campaign to promote the state of Kentucky in the first ever crowdfunded Super Bowl commercial.
The campaign, started by three advertising creatives, will recognize the state of Kentucky as the birthplace of the Happy Birthday song among other feel-good homages to the Bluegrass State.
If you think our middle school science and math education is below par, now is your chance to do something about it. Today the magazine Popular Science joined forces with InnoCentive to announce a new competition to come up with a series of new curricula around a series of topics. Each winner will receive a purse of $5,000. Lesson plans need to include a hands on activity for students and should cost no more than $50 total in readily available materials per class.
Google Map Maker opened up to U.S. users today, allowing anyone to submit updates, revisions and additional information to the company's online mapping service. The tool was originally designed for users in other countries without access to the mapping resources we have stateside. Says Google, prior to the launch of Map Maker, only 15% of the world's population had detailed access to online maps of their neighborhoods, but now, citizen cartographers in 183 countries and regions have created maps of the places they live. Today, 30% of users people worldwide have access to online maps, thanks to Map Maker.
Given the extensive mapping services available here in the U.S., why would Google open up this tool here? Google is crowdsourcing corrections and additions, the company says, by allowing its users to add more detail about the places they know best. But there may be more to it than that.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is asking the public to help them identify a bunch of gear in their digital collection that their experts cannot figure out. As io9 put it, the NIST "doesn't just produce technical specifications for everything from wifi to voting machines - they also have a digital archive devoted to the study of early technology."
The mystery machines, which come from the NIST's collection of scientific instruments in Gaithersburg, Maryland, are mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
GLOBE at Night is aggregating public measurements of the night sky (or lack thereof) from March 22 through April 6 in the Northern Hemisphere and March 24 through April 6 in the Southern. This is the sixth year the group has used you all to map the encroaching light pollution in the world.
Using a web app that is provided online, participants are asked to attempt to identify certain constellations and, if they can, rate them against magnitude charts. The project tracks the increasing problem of disappearing darkness, which can interrupt the cycles of plant and animal life, eventually to a fatal degree.
The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has joined forces with crowdsourcing document outfit Scripto , open source document transcription tool, to transcribe and share a piece of U.S. history thought to be lost.
The project "Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800" seeks to transcribe and digitize copies of papers from a formative part of American history, previously thought to be lost to fire. Projects like these rarely suffer from a surfeit of funding, so using Scripto to coordinate a crowdsourced transcription has made the project possible.
