Crowdsourcing - ReadWriteWeb

$1m in 1 Day: Meet Double Fine, the New Kings of Kickstarter

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:09:25 -0800

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.

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]]> "[This] is kind of a big deal," wrote game journalist Jim Squires at Gamezebo this morning.

"Not just for Double Fine, but for Kickstarter and the industry as a whole. Can you imagine what the gaming world would look like if big developers like this could raise the funds needed to get to market without a publisher? Sure it's worked for indies, but we're talking Tim Schaefer here. Between Tim and Ron Gilbert (also now with Double Fine), these are the people that defined the LucasArts era of adventure games."

In other words, this is a case of the famous getting more famous on a new platform - directly with their own fame instead of with a traditional publisher's help. The same was true of LunaTik, the previous Kickstarter champ. Cool stories, but the democratization of fundraising thus deserves to be understood with a grain of salt.

Game blog Joystiq reported:

"'I can confirm that there's not been a project that has raised as much as this one in such a short timeframe,' [a Kickstarter] spokesperson revealed. Kickstarter says it does not keep a running tally finalized projects, but its listing of 'Most Funded' ventures shows a number of concepts that came close to the one million dollar mark, since 2009.

"The Kickstarter spokesperson also confirmed that Double Fine's project 'now has more backers than any other project on the site.' The current total of backers sits at over 17,000." [It's now up to 25k+]

The Gamification of Game Creation

I don't know as much about gaming as either of the two writers above, but I'm learning about gamification. The Gamification.org wiki lists a number of game dynamics that I think are at play in this, if not every, Kickstarter campaign.

Epic Meaning to the fundraising Quest, because funders are challenging authority and changing the world.
The challenge to big game publishers and their conventional wisdom that point-and-click adventure games are dead confers what Gamification experts call Epic Meaning to the (in this case highly accelerated) fundraising Quest, because funders are challenging authority and changing the world. The Achievements and Reward Schedules that all Kickstarter campaigns are encouraged to include are aided by the Urgent Optimism created by the record-breaking pace of this campaign in particular, the strong reputation of the team being backed, the relatively immediate gratification of games themselves and the fact that a David vs Goliath story always has some amount of urgency to it.
There is clearly a Countdown and participants are racing it with a combination of Ownership, Community Collaboration and Virality. Finally, the Kickstarter updates in general and the video documentation of this game's creation both fit within what Gamification analysts call Cascading Information Theory. "The theory," the Gamification.org wiki explains, "that information should be released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative."

Put all that within the context of a known brand (the game makers themselves), the well-executed but still-fresh infrastructure of Kickstarter and the end result of a game that is easy to afford ($15 gets you a download on Steam when it's done), and you've got a recipe for some gamified game creation. In this case, record levels of game creation.

As Jane McGonigal tweeted to Double Fine's Tim Schaefer this afternoon, "@TimOfLegend You're making us all feel like we're a part of something historic ^_^"
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The Year in Review at Kickstarter

David Strom — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 07:00:00 -0800

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.

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]]> We wrote about their best of 2010 and also >covered them earlier in the fall .

Some of the projects they highlighted in their year-end blog were last minute fights to funding. Others got funded right off the bat, such as this elegant iPhone Elevation Dock, as you can see from the chart below showing the funding process over time. The TikTok, one of their most famous projects that added a watch band to your iPod Nano, was so popular that it is now being sold in the Apple stores.

The blog post also has links to the favorite pitch videos, some of them are quite amusing and interesting, like this one that publishes a new limited-edition version of Huck Finn that reimages the Jim character as a neutral-sounding robotic character.

But what is most interesting is the funding process from its biggest benefactors According to the company, one individual (the company didn't release any identities) backed more than 700 projects: that is a lot of donations and a lot of swag. Others in the top ten backed hundreds of projects.

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Google Accused of Fraud Against African Competitor [Updated: Google Statement]

Curt Hopkins — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:44:00 -0800

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.

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Mocality did some pretty deep forensics on their traffic and discovered a specific IP, which used a Kenyan ISP and utlized the latest Chrome build, was extensively accessing their business listings. So on December 21, they re-directed a percentage of the inquiries from that IP to a page that gave a different phone number - one that connected to the Mocality call center. The calls that came in were startling.

Here's an example, a call from someone identifying himself as Douglas, from Google Kenya, who tells the person who answered the phone, whom he believes is a business owner using Mocality, that Google and Mocality are collaborating on a new website service. Another call, available here in transcript, has the speaker accusing Mocality itself of fraud. They estimated the team identified as Google Kenya made 20-25 calls per hour to Mocality customers.

After a Christmas break, Magdalinski said there were no more instances of access from that IP. Instead, a new trend started from an Indian IP which belongs to Google. The calls began again, but this time from India. Here's an example, starring a caller named "Deepthi."

"It looks like Google has now outsourced the Getting Kenya Businesses Online operation to India!" wrote Magdalinski. He continued:

"When we started this investigation, I thought that we'd catch a rogue call-centre employee, point out to Google that they were violating our Terms and conditions (sections 9.12 and 9.17, amongst others), someone would get a slap on the wrist, and life would continue.
"I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on 2 continents."

We contacted Joseph Mucheru, Google's senior lead for Sub-Saharan Africa. We met and interviewed him in October in his office at Google's Nairobi headquarters where we talked, among other things, about the GKBO program. We have yet to hear back from him. We also contacted Magdalinski. If either respond, we will update this article.

Forbes reported that Google's policy manager for Africa, Ory Okholloh, said the company would make a statement by the end of the day. It is the end of the day in Kenya and all we have been able to get is a boilerplate line from Google's corporate PR department.

"These are clearly very serious allegations, and we are doing everything possible to investigate them."

Other publications, including The Register, have carried a different statement.

"We're aware that a company in Kenya has accused us of using some of their publicly available customer data without permission. We are investigating the matter and will have more information as soon as possible."

Clearly, Google is looking to shift the focus onto the fact that the information in Mocality's database was user generated. However, as Magdalinski notes on his Twitter account, "The real issue is not taking 30% of our 'publicly available db' - it's what was said to our customers on the calls."

UPDATE: Here is the statement from Nelson Mattos, Vice-President for Product and Engineering, Europe and Emerging Markets:

"We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality's data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We've already unreservedly apologized to Mocality. We're still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we'll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved."

As Matt McGee notes on Marketing Land:

"The statement doesn't specifically say that Google itself was doing the scraping and attempting to contact Mocality's customers. By saying 'a team of people working on a Google project,' Google keeps open the possibility of placing responsibility for the incident on third party contractors - which is similar to what happened last week when Google said that ad agencies were responsible for a poorly-executed sponsored blog post campaign for Google Chrome."

During my conversation with Mucheru in October, he spoke of GKBO as a Google program, conducted by the Kenya office he oversees, and not by a contracted group. If this was inaccurate, I hope he will correct it in his response to ReadWriteWeb's questions.

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The Long March from Crowdsourcing to a Global Meritocracy

Bruno Haid — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:30:00 -0800

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.

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]]> Bruno is a European-born entrepreneur currently busy building a simple marketplace for professional services, work|i|o. His previous company developed algorithmic strategies for startups and global companies like McKinsey, Deutsche Telecom or Daimler.Here's how it could work.

Currently the not perfectly labelled crowdsourcing is associated with the negative touch of cheap designer specwork and lowest possible labour costs. Despite even that working very well commercially, the real potential will show itself in the next iterations of this trend:

The reason we have company structures and processes, and by now organizations that are being deemed not only too big to fail but also too big to run, is that it was the most efficient way since the industrial revolution. Hiring, training and retaining employees for the assembly line is certainly more effective than trying to build cars with different people each day.

But the web, just like with the music industry, accounting and even your x-ray exams, could do something remarkable to white collar work itself: Making it portable. And turn the whole system upside down. It's now way less complex to tell people who you are and what you need than to tell them what to do. There are tons of people out there who know exactly what they're doing in their respective field. Smart people who even understand your most complex needs.

So why again is the relationship revolving around permanent affiliation, and not expertise? Why do companies stovepipe ever increasing complexity into the same static workforce? And why do people stick to jobs that only allow them to do what they really like and are all about in some fraction of their time spent in these jobs?

Using the web to describe whats needed and thus making work more liquid could launch an exceptional shift in how we work: Imagine being able to have the right talent at your fingertips, no matter what the tasks are about today. Or were yesterday. And will be tomorrow.

Imagine being able to design your day, every day: A Twitter style timeline containing work units that are customized to your real interests, expertise and aspirations, aggregated from sources and services around the world.

CrowdConf2011, the industry meeting this week in San Francisco, and the next wave of startups that work to advance those first steps into new areas are capable of changing the way we work forever, to a better. It may be a rough ride with some wrong turns. But I'm fully convinced and confident that whats lurking in there will benefit us all. Welcome to the journey, it has just begun.

Globe photo by James Halliday

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Kentucky Boys Kickstart a $3.5 Million Super Bowl Ad

Douglas Crets — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:30:00 -0800

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.

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]]> Whit Hiler, who co-founded the effort with buddies Kent Carmichael and Griffin Vanmeter, says that so far Kentucky for Kentucky has raised $2,600. They have set the go-ahead funding level at $3.5 million. They hope to have that much by November 7, a few months before the famed football match.

They have a ways to go, but that has not diminished Hiler's enthusiasm. "We're going rogue with it," he jokes. "The idea would be to have millions of Kentuckians invested in this project. This is about shedding light to the world that Kentucky is awesome and it kicks ass."

Kentucky, like other states facing fiscal pressures, could use the tourism boost, too.

We'll be tracking this project, and if you feel like getting a T-shirt in exchange for a few greenbacks to the Kentucky cause - and another possible proof of Kickstarter's successful crowdfunding concept - you can head on over.

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Win $5k to Redesign a New Middle School Science Curriculum

David Strom — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 09:25:04 -0800

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.

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]]> The deadline is the end of October and there are already several hundred people hard at work. There are prizes in five different categories such as Biomimetic Design, Climate Change, Fuel Cells, Polymers and Big Data Analysis. Middle school Hadoop developers? It could be an emerging trend: now they just aren't all about using Facebook, but designing the next data interfaces for it.

InnoCentive has lots of other crowdsourced projects and problem solving challenges on their site than the PopSci challenge, it is worth checking out if you haven't heard of them before or read our article from several years ago here.

This is the week for contests. Over on our ReadWriteHack site we mention a contest being run by the US Defense Department for wannabe computer forensic examiners. And over on our Enterprise site, we wrote last week about how Intuit paid out a series of prizes for QuickBooks and Quicken App developers .

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Google Map Maker Comes to U.S.

Sarah Perez — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 08:23:49 -0800

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.

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With the Map Maker, Google says you can fix the name of local businesses or add improved descriptions. You can also add more information about an area, like bike lanes or the names of buildings on college campuses, for example. To prevent any high jinx from occurring, Google notes that it will review the user-created submissions before they go live.

While on the surface, the launch of Map Maker in the U.S. appears to just be another useful feature to differentiate Google's mapping service from its competitors, there may be some additional motives behind this launch.

One motive may have to do with the expansion of Google Places, the search company's Yelp-like business locator service. In April, Google merged its socially-infused local business recommendation service called Hotpot into Google Places, the larger business database which provides reviews and venue information. Now Google is crowdsourcing edits to that same database via this U.S. launch of Google Map Maker.

Building a Better Location Database, Thanks to You

One of the primary assets of companies involved in providing location-based services is their database of venues. On this front, Facebook is a tough Google competitor, with its own database of locations called Facebook Places. In September 2010, a company spokesperson said the goal for Facebook Places was to be the "central platform for location data" across the Web. And in February 2011, Facebook made some under-the-hood changes to the way it houses venues listed on its site, a move that enables the network to have an accurate, universally standardized database of locations.

Location-based check-in service Foursquare also has its own venue database, and, like Google will now as well, uses crowdsourcing to help keep that database accurate. In theory, select superusers on Foursquare's service are enlisted to clean up duplicate venues and make sure each pushpin is accurately placed. The job of crowdsourcing this cleanup is not going well in my local area - nearly every major venue has at least 2 or 3 clones, if not more. In fact, last I checked, my gym was listed four or five times! (I'd love to hear more about your experience with this problem, or if you don't have one.) This may or may not be an across-the-board complaint, but it does highlight the challenges of creating a location database where users themselves are permitted to enter venues of their own, with no direct company oversight.

It should also be noted that another Google competitor, Microsoft's Bing, has also gone the crowdsourcing route to some extent, partnering with Open Street Map (OSM) back in August 2010, to make it available as an additional layer on top of Bing Maps. The company has donated aerial imagery to the Open Street Maps community too, and, in November, hired OSM founder Steve Coast to come work at Bing Maps.

To put it simply, today's announcement from Google has a deeper impact to the company's overall strategic initiatives than simply a case of "oh look, new tools!" Clean, accurate, robust, detailed and up-to-date maps and databases of locations will be key to growing any business that leverages location data in the future, which today includes a number of mobile services, and their online counterparts.

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Help the National Institute of Standards & Tech ID Mystery Machines

Curt Hopkins — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:30:00 -0800

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.

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]]> "We have some artifacts in our collection we want to identify, so we thought we could exhibit them online and ask for help," said NIST Digital Services Librarian Regina Avila. "It was fun to photograph them, but challenging. Some artifacts were broken, others had missing pieces. Some were heavy and others were fragile."

Currently, 137 artifacts are on the site, and hundreds more will be added in the coming months.

The unidentified objects come with some really stylish names. To wit:

Instrument with Eight Dials Set in Wooden Frame

Black Cylindrical Instrument with Small Round Window Set on Tripod

Metal Instrument in Wood Case

Photos from NIST Digital Archive | additional sources: PopSci

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Help Track the Death of the Night Sky

Curt Hopkins — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 17:00:00 -0800

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.

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]]> As the administrators point out, the night sky is a disappearing resource.

"With half of the world's population now living in cities, many urban dwellers have never experienced the wonderment of pristinely dark skies and maybe never will. Light pollution is obscuring people's long-standing natural heritage to view stars."

Among the negative changes light pollution brings, GLOBE lists the following as examples.

Disorientation of sea turtle hatchlings by beachfront lighting
Nesting choices and breeding success of birds
Behavioral and physiological changes in salamanders
Disturbances of nocturnal animals
Altered natural light regimes in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems

In addition to the effect on biological life and the psychological - some would say spiritual - effects of the absence of the stars, light pollution decreases the earth's ability to resolve hyrdocarbon pollution as well, as Wired points out in its coverage. Excess light destroys those chemicals that destroy hydrocarbons and which normally build up in the atmosphere each night.

Last year saw 17,805 participants tracking their night skies; 15,300 the year before; and 6,838 in 2008. They are hoping to at least hit 15,000 this year.

All the datasets from each year are available, to professionals and lay people alike.

Other sources: PopSci

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Crowdsourcing the Preservation of U.S. War Papers

Curt Hopkins — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:30:00 -0800

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.

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]]> The collection consists of 45,000 documents consisting of hundreds of thousands of individual pages from the records of what later came to be known as the Department of Defense. Volunteers register to become a Transcription Associate and then can browse to select whichever document they wish to transcribe or search the collection if they have particular interests.

In addition to making it financially feasible, letting the public take a hand in such a project has the benefit of bringing history close to the volunteer and turning that volunteer into an evangelist for the importance of history to contemporary life. Also, it gives the historians involved a sense, as the documents are transcribed, for what the public finds the most compelling.

The project is funded by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission of the National Archives and the National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities.

Truman building photo from Wikimedia Commons

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Palestine Prime Minster Crowdsources Cabinet with Facebook

Curt Hopkins — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 15:00:00 -0800

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is one of the Mideast leaders who isn't reacting to the social media pointed in his direction with a knee-jerk ban. Instead, he is rolling his Facebook pageout as a platform for crowdsourcing his cabinet.

Dr. Fayyad dismissed his old cabinet on February 14, in the wake of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. He is obliged to appoint a new cabinet in less than six weeks, so he's reached out to the young people to ask them to be a part of the process.

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]]> According to Foreign Policy, the reaction to the outreach was quite strong, with a thousand responses posted within only a couple of hours.

Like most situations in which people who've held things bottled up get a chance to directly address a decision maker, there were both statements of encouragement and indictments of the collusion between Fayyad's Fatah party and Hamas.

Fayyad's goal seems to be to bring the Gaza Strip, under Hamas, and the West Bank, under Fatah, back together as a single polity. One way he hopes to do that is get the youth of Palestine on his side using social media.

Long before the Jasmine Uprisings, Palestinian youth used Facebook. One group, Gaza Youth Break Out!, issued a stunning manifesto, condemning all the old fogies they believe have united to keep them down for years. Walid Husayin used Facebook to satirize Islam and was arrested for it.

Time will tell if Dr. Fayyad actually intends to act on the feelings of his constituents, or if this was merely a stunt. If he does, it could create a sense of investment in the process that seems to be in short supplyin Palestine these days.

Fayyad and Ramallah photos via Wikimedia Commons

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The Wiki Strikes Again: German Official Drops "Dr" After Wiki Investigation

Mike Melanson — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 16:38:19 -0800

The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have been dubbed by some to be "Wiki Revolutions" because "just as people can self-organize to contribute to Wikipedia...they can participate in social change and coalesce into revolutionary movements as never before." Now, it seems that wikis may not only be behind toppling governments, but also stripping plagiarizing government officials of their educational titles.

This week, German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has said he would remove the "Dr" from his name while a plagiarism investigation of his PhD took place. Where did this investigation originate? Wikia, the for-profit wiki project started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

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]]> According to a Wikia spokesperson, the whole thing "started with Guttenplag, the Wikia site that users set up to record instances of plagiarism in the doctoral thesis of German Defense Minister Guttenberg." Apparently, the site grew rapidly to more than 1,130 pages of content and 1.5 million pageviews per day, forcing Guttenberg to respond publicly.

Global political leaders are used to worrying about wikis -- from the 'Controversy' sections of their Wikpedia biographies to the still-ominous Wikileaks (which incidentally is not a wiki, considering it is closed and non-collaborative).

But now they have a bit more to be concerned about -- having their academic qualifications publicly discredited by the new "plagiarism wikis" we've seen popping up on the Wikia platform.

The newest incarnation of the "Wiki Revolution" doesn't stop there. Apparently, Muammar al-Gaddafi's son has become the next target, with users questioning whether or not his thesis is authentic or plagiarized.

The empowering effects of the Internet have started to rear their head beyond badmouthing brands. Where else might we see the power of the people manifest into real world effects? Will investigative journalism be, in some ways, replaced by a crowdsourced, wiki-based future where the general population takes on these sorts of questions?

Wikia says that this "could very well be the start of a global trend" and that it will be keeping an eye out for further developments, noting that its platform supports multiple languages and could spread to more regions.

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Crowdsource Your Friends' Opinions with Cloudy iPhone App

Mike Melanson — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:46:55 -0800

Have you ever tried asking a question on Facebook and wondered if anyone ever saw it? The problem with asking all of your friends on Facebook a question through a status update is that you never know who is going to see it. Between Facebook's algorithms, the mass of updates and the simple fact that not everyone lurks on Facebook 24 hours a day, you never know who your question will reach.

Enter Cloudy, an iPhone app that "lets you quickly and easily ask groups of friends for their opinions."

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The app just launched in the App Store yesterday and makes it simple to create quick polls of your friends.

Pick friends from your contacts - even if they don't have an iPhone - and Cloudy will text them your question. Cloudy then displays the responses to your yes/no and multiple-choice questions, and allows you to easily send your decision back to your friends. You can also answer questions from your friends right in the app.

Cloudy lets you create friend groups for quickly asking the same people about something over and over again. Unlike group chatting apps, Cloudy is more of a polling tool than a communication tool. That is, you create either a yes/no question or a multiple choice poll and send it to your friends. As they vote, you can see their responses on the app.

On the vote-creating end of things, everything was smooth as butter. On the response end of things, however, not all were satisfied (as you can see in the screenshot of the poll responses). We imagine it's an entirely different experience when all parties have the app, but when you're on the SMS end of things, you get one message after another and need to reply with specific words to respond - it's almost like suddenly being thrust into dealing with the DMV's automated phone system when you were just going about your day.

There are lots of apps these days that are making sure to be inclusionary, but we're wondering if this one might have left the SMS out of it. At what point do we leave the idea of feature phones behind, then again? That might be a question for another day, but it feels pertinent here. The in-app experience is great, whereas the SMS experience just got complaints.

Nonetheless, creating polls, getting statistics and being able to ask your friends for very specific responses, rather than simply asking open-ended questions, feels like something that could be rather addictive to the right crowds. "Which pizza place is better, Pepe's or Sally's?" you might ask.

What do you think - is a poll something you want to subject your friends to? Or do group messaging apps like Beluga or GroupMe satisfy all your needs in this realm?

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CNN Announces iReport Awards for Participatory Journalism

Mike Melanson — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 18:18:01 -0800

If you're a TV actor, you have the Emmy Awards. If you're a journalist, you have the Pulitzer Prize. But if you're a citizen reporter, what do you have? Nothing, until now.

CNN announced today that it was launching the CNN iReport Awards "to honor the best examples of participatory journalism in 2010."

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]]> CNN first launched the user-generated iReport feature nearly five years ago and last year alone users contributed more than 150,000 "iReports". The project surpassed more than 740,000 "iReporters" in 2010. How does it work? Users submit reports to CNN directly on the Web or from the iPhone app, which are posted to the iReport section of CNN.com.

"The collaborative relationship that we have with our iReporters is one of the unique strengths of CNN, and in many ways represents the future of storytelling," said Meredith Artley, managing editor and vice president of CNN.com, in a press release. "These awards are designed to celebrate those outstanding efforts."

According to the release, awards will be broken up into six categories: Breaking News, Original Reporting, Compelling Imagery (photos or video), Commentary, Personal Story, and Interview. In each category, five users have been nominated and will be judged by a panel of "innovators and trailblazers in participatory storytelling."

Nominees run the gamut, from iReporter Johnny Colt, who "took a boat out to the coast of Grand Island in Louisiana to expose BP for its slow effort in cleaning up the oil spill", to Sam Bolton, who "investigated the lack of progress made to clean up unexploded bomblets from the Vietnam War." While all of these iReporters may have varying levels of training and experience, they have something in common - the desire to relate their experiences and stories to the world, and CNN offers that platform. Of course, anyone could simply upload videos or relate these accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Blogger or any other "Web 2.0" medium, but CNN might lend a bit of credibility. When CNN independently confirms details on a report, it stamps it with a "vetted" badge.

Awards will close on March 7, but until then you can see all 30 nominees on the iReport Awards site.

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Can We Crowdfund Our Lives?

Mike Melanson — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 19:08:00 -0800

What do a chipped tooth, a world record and the relocation of a popular café in downtown Oakland all have in common? Each needed money to achieve a goal and, rather than going the usual routes of taking out loans or operating on credit, each found funding through crowd funding.

At a panel at Social Media Week in San Francisco today, The Next Web's Hermione Way led a discussion on the new, age-old form of financing that's become uniquely possible with the advent of social media.

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]]> Attending the panel were Jeffery Self, Tammy Camp and Cortt Dunlap, each with an interesting tale of how they used crowd funding to achieve their goals. Self said he raised $3,400 total in just three days to help pay off an emergency root canal and surgery for a chipped tooth that resulted from a misplaced head-butt. Camp, an entrepreneur and kiteboarder, related her 48 hour funding of a kiteboarding world record in the Dominican Republic. Cortt Dunlap told his tale of how he raised enough money to move his local coffee shop to a new location when circumstances caused the lease to be pulled from beneath it.

How was this all achieved? Each story hinged on the idea that social media made this sort of crowd funding uniquely possible. That, and a site called IndieGoGo.

According to IndieGoGo director of marketing Erica Labovitz, crowdfunding is nothing new, but social media certainly makes a difference.

"Crowd funding is nothing new. What's new about it is that it's happening on line and through social media," said Labovitz. "A fun fact that most people don't know is that the Statue of Liberty was crowd funded. What's different now is that you have access to so many more people than you otherwise would."

Labovitz said that IndieGoGo, which was founded in 2008, has expanded to more than 160 countries worldwide and currently has more than 16,000 campaigns on the site.

While all three panelists offered tales of successful crowd funding, moderator Hermione Way offered that more than 60% of all crowd funding efforts ended unsuccessfully. What, then, had been at the center of their success, she asked? The general consensus, it seemed, was to offer a genuine vision for why such funding was needed and what you planned to do with the money raised. Self said that this video helped with his campaign, while others simply said that it was through existing connections on social media sites that their campaigns really got rolling.

If a chipped tooth, a world record and a relocation are all viable crowd-funded projects, then could we not crowd fund our lives, asked Way? Or how about our start-ups?

"I wouldn't say it cancels out VCs at all," offered Camp. "Maybe it will give you proof of concepts for angel investing. I don't think it will disrupt that industry, but it will give it proof of concept."

We've seen examples of successful startup crowd-funding before. Will this be a new, disruptive force in the tech world? Or will it simply be a new step on the way to economic viability, somewhere between bootstrapping and venture funding?

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